Welcome to Reader Meet Author. This is where Nils and Jessica talk about the books they read in 2009.

Monday, April 27, 2009

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle


Haruki Murakami's novels are a bit like Rube Goldberg machines:  the main character gets involved in an increasingly bizarre series of odd events without much rhyme or reason.  Sure, it's kind of entertaining while it's going on, but at the end of the story the reader is scratching their heads at what the point of the whole thing was.

In the Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the main character, Toru Okada, loses both his cat and his wife, which somehow causes him to get involved with psychics, haunted property, an evil brother-in-law, and some very vague stuff about evil spirits living inside of people.  The meaning of it all is never clearly explained, and the ending leaves tons of loose ends.  Toru is also a frustratingly passive protagonist.  He repeatedly says that he wants to get his wife back, but seems content to wait around while other characters come to him to move the plot along.  His major dramatic action for the first half of the book is to climb down inside a dry well, to think.  The characters' dialogue has a stilted, artificial quality to it, but this might be because of the translation.  

Murakami does try to bring some gravitas to the book by weaving in a story about Japan's involve in China in World War II, but it ends up being yet another unresolved tangent in a book that's packed with them.  For a novel about Japan and its World War II history that's much more satisfying, may I suggest Carl Shuker's excellent book "The Method Actors"?

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