The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994) by Haruki Murakami

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle yet!

Boy, Murakami is a hell of a storyteller. There were portions of this book that I just could not put down. An event with the veterinarian and the men in baseball uniforms towards the end of the book, in particular, had me slicing through lines with my eyes like an inkjet printer. At the conclusion of that chapter I found my mouth gaping wide open and my lips all dried out. Murakami is that good.

I want to put a warning up-front here: I really liked this book. It's one of the best I've read this year. But this review is going to skew negative. This is precisely because I enjoy the book so much—The good parts are so good that the parts that feel uneven stand out all the more. So, despite reading my coming criticism, please keep in mind that I did still really enjoy this read.

So although the storytelling packs a wallop on the smaller scale, the overarching narrative of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle ended up feeling so disjointed it hampered my enjoyment a bit. I know that sounds contradictory, and that really encompasses a lot of how I feel about this book. I love it, a lot. But I also really dislike portions of it. I can't shake the feeling that many of these episodes would have been better as a mix of short stories and novellas considering the effort it must have taken to tie them together in one 600+ page cohesive narrative. Because so much of it does not feel cohesive. The thread tying all of these branches to the trunk was so thin at times that I didn't really grasp where it was at all. At a certain point I was burning to read through a plot synopsis, absolutely aching to spoil the book for myself. This desire came not from how good the narrative was and how badly I wanted to know the conclusion, nor how hooked I was on Murakami's characters, but because I wanted some assurance that all of this was going to pay off somehow, that Murakami wasn't just making things weird to have them be weird. A lot of it does, and I wasn't disappointed by the story, but neither can I say I felt completely satisfied at its conclusion. Of course, I think that was the goal; this was never meant to be concluded in a neat and satisfying manner.

And that's fine, usually. A good story doesn't have to tie everything together into a nice, pretty bow at the end to be a good story. And this is a weird book. It's pretty out there. I know that's Murakami's thing and that's why people like them, but writing a really weird piece of surrealist fiction is a tightrope act. It's difficult because you can't throw so much odd shit into the narrative that it feels like the odd shit is starting to exist because the writer is thinking to himself "I want this to be a weird book, and here is a weird idea I have. Now where can I shove this in?". And that's the problem I have with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. There's a lot of crap in this book that seems to have no logical reason for existing beyond "Murakami thought up this weird thing and jammed it awkwardly, without reason, into his book".

The weak plotting and characters compound the problem. Welcome to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: or, Every Goddamn Character Is A Psychic. Name every character in this book that doesn't have some kind of supernatural power or affinity. Mamiya perhaps fits the bill, aside from when you consider the psychic experience he had in the well, or the fact that he cannot die when he's on the continent. And maybe Kumiko, but we're led to believe there's something special about her, hence her brother's interest in her. So the only one that really comes to mind is the protagonist's uncle, who appears for a grand total of like 5 pages. Everyone else in this book is a psychic, has some small modicum of clairvoyance, or is magical in some way. Even the goddamn cat has a magic tail. The issue this creates if that for the vast majority of this story is one of these psychics/magic folks--Honda, or Malta, or Creta, or Nutmeg--is telling our protagonist via their magically begotten knowledge to go somewhere or do something, and the protagonist following their words like an obedient dog to move the plot along. It all felt contrived. "Find the cat", "Go down the deepest well", "go people watching", "take all this money and let people lick your face for psychic healing". For the vast majority of this story the protagonist has zero agency whatsoever. He is just following what everyone else in the story tells him. His wife is even missing, and supposedly he's desperate to find her, but he spends three straight days meditating in a well, or he spends more than a week sitting on a bench in Shinjuku doing nothing but people watching simply because, each time, he was told to do so by Honda and by his uncle. It makes no sense. I was yelling my head at him to get off his ass and do something, and was frustrated even further when these seemingly nonsensical choices worked at perfectly for him.

This nonsense continues until the final fifth of the book, in which he begins making bold, dangerous decisions (buying the haunted/cursed/whatever vacant property, hacking in to Cinnamon's computer to send messages, remaining in the "other" world when told to leave because it's dangerous, following the waiter instead of entering room 208, etc) that don't seem to have any logical foundation. It was such a frustrating experience partway through, thinking "this guy doesn't do anything by himself. He's an empty vessel", only to have him prove me wrong by doing a bunch of weird shit for no apparent reason and have it work out. At best, I couldn't take him seriously as a character. I had zero reason to root for him and instead viewed him as a pair of glasses with which I was experiencing the main narrative. At worst, he pissed me off by doing seemingly dumb stuff which worked out in the end, because--Of course! He had some psychic reasoning for doing so to which we, the reader, are not privy for some reason. Murakami is better than this, of course: He shows it in this very book with the strength of the Mamiya and the Nutmeg & Cinnamon chapters, which, though extremely compelling and well written, feel more like optional, disjointed backstory that is unnecessary to the main narrative of Okada's search for his missing wife. It's the best stuff in the entire book and it's only tangentially related to what is supposed to be the main narrative.

I can hear the criticism already, so I feel like I have to make this clear up-front: I don't believe you have to spoonfeed the reader everything, or that 100% of your story has to make sense. A little mystery and ambiguity gives the story legs and lets the reader chew it over in their brain for a while after completing it. It sticks with the reader and provides some lasting impact. But too often I felt Murakami pushed a little too far with the nonsensical weirdness. There were certain scenes that begged for an explanation, that I felt were even rendered cheesy or contrived when left without explanation. As I grew more familiar with this story there were scenes I read that I could immediately tell were never going to be touched again, and it completely removed any intended impact from me: "Alright, so this is just weird to be weird, then". For example: Why the hell does the protagonist ejaculate when "healing" these people, or whatever? There's zero purpose for it, it just happens because it's weird and will make people feel weird when they read it. Why do the people that are "healed" have to tongue kiss the facial mark? What the hell ever happened to Malta and Creta, who just abruptly dropped out of the narrative partway through, and what the hell happened to the dude who climbed the tree and disappear? Who is the faceless man? Why was Nutmeg's husband dismembered? These questions are just a few of the questions I have off the top of my head that I felt required more fleshing out for a proper climactic pay-off. Instead, they're just instances of annoyance that I try not to think about because they ruin my enjoyment of an otherwise intriguing story. That's not to say all the weirdness in this detracts from the story, there are quite a few examples of proper weirdness that I felt was either justified, or logical enough that they added to the story: the episode surrounding the reason for Cinnamon's muteness and how it was relayed was masterful and eerie, Creta's psychic prostitution posed some really interesting questions, the way in which Noboru Wataya is described early in the book is so strange and compelling and I love the idea of he and the protagonist existing as polar opposites of one another, Lieutenant Mamiya's experience in the well in Mongolia was perfectly written and just as weird as you'd expect for an injured, dehydrated man on the verge of death, both brief episodes in which the singer appears strike a perfect balance of utter oddness while also providing some badly needed character development for the protagonist (holy crap, look at this! He does have emotions after all! He gets sad! He gets angry!).

So it's not all weird just to be weird. A lot of the weirdness is justified and added to my enjoyment of the story. This unevenness made me think that perhaps I missed a lot and there were reasons for this ham-fisted weirdness that made them fit better into the story that I just didn't catch. I took to Google after finishing the book and it turns out: Nope, people are just as puzzled as I am. Entire forum threads and Reddit discussions exist based on speculation for the reasons for this weirdness, and the answers inevitably begin to proceed down the "it's allegory/symbolism" avenue. To me, that's stretching the value of having this weirdness to begin with. To you, it may be different. That's for you to judge.

⭐⭐⭐⭐