The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I'm not too sure where to start with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  I liked it.  Putting why I liked it into words is just a bit of a head-scratcher.  I'm also a little conflicted because, although it's good, I just didn't enjoy it as much as after the quake or Kafka on the Shore.   The fact I enjoyed the latter of these two more isn't too difficult to reason out, it's about cats and libraries.  These are two of my favourite things.  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle features just the one cat, and he's named after a human and missing for a good half of the book.  I feel like if Haruki Murakami just added in more cats to all his books he'd finally win that Nobel Prize.  It worked for T.S. Eliot; eventually.

There's a sort of plot to the book, but it winds away and changes throughout the novel.  Ostensibly, it is the tale of Toru Okada searching for his lost cat.  In reality, this is a jumping off point for Toru finding a bunch of characters with long stories to tell, his wife leaving him and getting stuck in a well.  The cat, once forgotten, returns on his own.  I'm not explaining it well, but it's a tricky book, the plot slips through any attempt to summarise it quickly. Characters disappear and are replaced by new enigmatic figures just as each one begins to lose its sense of mystery.  In this way, we're put into the same (slightly frustrating) position as Toru.  While I love the style of story-telling and that not everything is explained to the nth degree as in most western literature; Toru, for example, gains a loses a blue mark on his cheek through out the book for no clear reason.   The disappearing characters and plot lines that trail off mean that this isn't an easy book to love.    

Toru is bland.  He needs to be, I think for the book to work.  He is a character who, rather than driving action is acted upon by the larger personalities of those he meets in the novel.  The fact that he is the character we're stuck with is almost a shame.  Early in the novel, Toru meets Malta and Creta Kato who are a fascinating pair of sisters offering psychic help to find the missing cat.  Instead of actually helping they reveal their life stories and Creta, the younger, acts as a kind of dream-prostitute, eventually seducing Toru in the real world for payment in clothes.  The pair only feature in the first two of the three volumes of the novel and the later part of the book suffers for it.  I want to go with them where ever they go rather than be stuck in the Tokyo suburbs with Toru and his next bad influence.  Even if we can't follow them, I want to know what happens to them.  They seem too important to just fade away.  There is also a phenomenal sub-plot about the brutality of World War Two, which crops up through out the three volumes.  This is probably the only plot line that feels resolved by the end of the book.

Again, I feel like I'm not explaining any of this with any particular clarity, so I'll move to something easier to put my finger on.  The well.  There is a well in the garden of an abandoned (possibly cursed) house.  Toru takes to climbing into this well to think, this is actually where he acquires his blue mark.  Anyway, on his first trip to the bottom of the well, his rope ladder is pulled up and the well cover is sealed over by his teenage neighbour May Kasahara.  This leads to deep introspection by Toru, but it reminded me so strongly of Ringu, both the book and the film that I struggled in taking the whole thing seriously.  I think the Koji Suzuki novel does pre-date or is, at least, contemporary to the original publication of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and while I doubt Murakami was influenced in his writing, I was certainly influenced in my reading and I really can't help but wonder if anyone else was.  This kind of makes me want to go off on a tangent, wondering if teenagers today would understand the VHS tapes used in Ringu, or if they'd be just as confused as I used to be by references to betamax. 

Anyway, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is good.  That is the message to take away from this blog.  It's by no means the place to start with Murakami, though.  I'm glad it's not the first of his books I've read because I think if it were I'd not be looking forward to his others on The List.  Being somewhat familiar with Murakami's style and tendency to blend the real world with the fantastic helped greatly.  If I'd have been expecting a linear narrative I would have been incredibly disappointed with the whole thing.  Having said that, I really do want to know what happened to Malta and Creta.

I'm now on to my Christmas horror story: At The Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft.