By Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin
(The Harvill Press)
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle starts off simply enough, when Toru Okada and his wife Kumiko lose their cat, and turns into a masterful novel, spanning philosophy, Japanese history, and metaphysics, among other things.
Toru Okada - or “Mr Wind-Up Bird”, as his teenage neighbour May Kasahara calls him - has recently been unemployed, and tends the home while his wife Kumiko goes to work. Then elements of the surreal start creeping into his life. Two mystical sisters with the improbable names of Malta and Creta Kano appear and predict his future. A mysterious woman makes explicit phone calls. And somehow all this is connected to Okada’s nemesis Noboru Wataya, and to the history of Japan and Manchukuo, its puppet state in northern China.
In the world of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, women occupy a space akin to a dreamscape: it’s never fully clear whether they are corporeal or just apparitions in a dream. Even Kumiko leaves Toru, leaving only a mysterious missive. Yet this retreat into a dream world is unsurprising: the world of men in the novel is the world of war and politics, a world where people are skinned alive and brutalised with a baseball bat. It is the world of Nomonhon, of unfixed borders (that between Mongolia and Manchukuo, effectively the Soviet Union and Japan), where trespass causes punishment and hurt.
Indeed, the ways in which the past bears on the present form a constant strand of thought in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Much in the same way as horrific events set in place the irreversible path of fate in a Greek tragedy, the horrific past of the Japanese in China affects the present, intruding upon even the passive - and hence seemingly blameless - life of Toru Okada. Like a patient with repressed memories, the lack of acknowledgement of the facts merely leads to internalised conflict and pain, and at times haunting fragments of a collective unconscious inevitably escape. The effects of the past are felt either acutely - as in the psychic pains of the various women in the novel - or not at all, as seen in the numbed response to life of Lt. Mamiya upon his return to Japan from a Soviet labour camp. Eventually, Okada connects to a mother-son pair (named, naturally, Nutmeg and Cinnamon), and finds a bizarre job easing women’s psychic burdens. And finally, as though acknowledging that passivity is not an appropriate response to the shattered world, Okada is forced into a series of very definitive actions in order to bring his wife back.
Stylistically, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force. Murakami excels, as always, in imbuing meaning into every little moment - the conversations between Toru and May seem to be bursting with a subtext of romantic and/or sexual interest, for instance. Throughout the novel, Murakami’s beautiful descriptions seem to capture pure undistilled emotions - pain, suffering, longing; the sense of disquiet of that pervades his work is especially notable here. Yet the feeling of unease does not mean The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is above humour. One of the central premises of Del Close’s Harold method of improv comedy is that you accept every proposition in the world, and this same bemused acceptance of the absurd is present here in Okada’s wry responses and the general flat tone in which surreal events are described. So Okada’s decision to rest at the bottom of a dry well and his subsequent passing through the wall of the well to an alternate world are no more and no less implausible in the novel than picking up dry-cleaning from the cleaners.
It’s true that the plot of the novel doesn’t quite cohere even at the end. Perhaps the various strands once unleashed were too numerous to pull together. But perhaps, too, feeling is first, and the inescapable aesthetic and philosophical responses to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle means the novel is one that sears itself into your consciousness.