I read this book over the course of a summer spent in the Mediterranean Sea, between Menorca and Corsica. Not only did this end up being a fitting reading location thanks to characters such as Malta or Creta Kano, whose namesakes originate from the Mediterranean, but the heavy heat perfectly resonated with the hazy, dreamy atmosphere found in the novel as I found myself at the border of a headache simply sitting still under the sun. Escaping the dense summer heat in the cool water felt akin to Toru Okada's transitions from reality to his subconscious.
Before diving into my analysis and breakdown (necessary, given the book’s massive size and the sheer number of storylines, characters, and themes), I’d like to share my overall impressions, now that I’ve just finished it. Honestly this story felt absolutely immersive and gorgeous to read. I was expecting a narrative laden with magical realism and surrealistic events bursting at the corner of every page. What I got instead was the musings of our main character who investigates the reasons behind his wife's departure. Though there’s a fair share of bizarre characters and unexplainable events, the story felt oddly reserved and peaceful for the most part—a quality I enjoyed quite a lot. The plot points throughout are intriguing and kept me on my toes, some of the side characters' individual stories which almost read as their own novellas were superb and the overall vibe or atmosphere was perfectly hazy and vague which is something I've come to appreciate from Murakami. I wish my positive feelings and enjoyment had lasted till the end but unfortunately I did find the last third of the novel to be a bit less engaging. We're presented to a few new characters and the story stutters a bit.
This is absolutely a book I'll be re-reading (though the 600 page count is quite daunting) as I'm sure I'll be getting new perspectives and points of appreciation. Now, here goes my ramblings around the themes, the characters and what they mean!
At its core, this is, in my view, a story about grief and how we manage to cope with it. Our main character and narrator, Toru Okada, is a passive and apathetic man who quits his job and does not have the ambition to do anything else. On a very surface level, it becomes apparent quickly that one of the reasons that Kumiko, Toru's wife, left him is because of the emasculation he suffers from. After quitting his job, she becomes the main bread winner and he takes on the role of dealing with household duties. She even mentions in one of her letters that she left him because she was satisfied sexually with other men. This ultimately leads to his wife distancing herself from him and leaving. This event pushes Toru into rethinking not only his relationship but also his apathetic stance to life. He will need to transcend his previous self. Of course, the story wouldn't move quite as well if we didn't have a gallery of other character who act as triggers to push Toru into acting out this transcendence of self. In that respect, Malta and Creta Kano, the medium sisters kickstart Toru's transition. One way of reading the novel is to see it through the eyes of someone who is going through a divorce and who is rethinking his entire relationship in order to pinpoint the moment that it started going wrong. Of course Toru takes this a step further, by having to do his meditation deep down in a well devoid of any light in order to reach into his subconscious. Most characters in the novel serve as triggers to push him into this meditative direction. Creta Kano as well as the telephone lady merge into being Kumiko at times, which reinforces the presence of these elements built to remind Toru to look into why Kumiko left him. At one point, Creta Kano even acts as Toru's sexual re-awakening and his newfound desire also pushes him to look for Kumiko. This manifests as him literally searching for Kumiko, which serves as a metaphor for his quest to understand why she left. Overall, Toru's experiences within his well of thinking and subsequently in the hotel locked in his subconscious were so well written and were my favourite portions of the novel. It's quite a literal view of stepping into your subconscious as if you were stepping into a deep, dark well but it was very effective. The well allows Toru to explore his own psyche, confronting fears and suppressed memories.
Besides the transcendence of oneself to surmount painful experiences, the other theme which comes back again and again has to be the inevitable nature of pain and suffering. The novel's namesake, the wind-up bird acts as an agent or announcer of impending pain or suffering to any character who hear it. In the novel this is not treated as an inherently evil occurrence, but rather a normal and natural event. The wind-up bird is merely a neutral messenger, despite heralding endless pain for the characters, creating a striking contrast. Characters throughout the book deal with pain at different scales. The main plotline is the most obvious as we follow Toru and the emotional pain of betrayal and the lack of understanding from Kumiko's departure. We have several chapters through Lieutenant Mamiya's flashbacks which serve as displays of man's physical cruelty in times of war. One particularly harrowing sequence (which is also one of the well written chapters in the entire novel) recounts Mamiya's experiences with a Soviet soldier who is very much into torturing his foes. On a larger scale, we also have a good number of plot points dealing in the history of pain of peoples and nations. The Nanking massacre, mass deportations from the Manchukuo puppet state, the hardships of prisoners in Soviet working camps are all vivid examples of this inflicted pain from men to other men. Pain is recurrent; as soon as one cycle ends, another begins. Toru may have 'freed' Kumiko by the end of the novel but she will not choose to go back to his side. What ends up being more important than the pain suffered, is the decision to not be defeated by said pain, and that is Toru's entire journey.
I think that the plot technically has weak points. Some characters or surreal events can sometimes feel like not-so subtle tools to move the plot along when it gets a bit slow. However, if you're really only focusing on the emotional odyssey that Toru is going through, a journey of the transcendence of self from apathy to actively standing up to the pain, the novel is a massive achievement in that regard. There's a brilliant mix of these dreamy events happening in his subconscious that collide with the very real implications of his divorce and the grief he's feeling about it. Kumiko's departure also acts as a catalyst for Toru to realise how alienated he feels from society. Kumiko and him had been so focused on building their home where they could live safely between each other, that he had slowly drifted away from those around him. This is resolved by the end, not only because Toru ends up interacting with and helping out a host of various characters, but also thanks to his newfound empathy for the horrible news he sees on TV in the hotel. Overall, the pacing was quite slow but this corresponded with Toru's step-by-step approach of diving into his psyche, often accelerating whenever he was on the brink of discovering something.
My only gripe with the novel is the weaker third part. The exclusion of the medium Kano sisters to introduce Cinnamon and Nutmeg was disappointing to me. I enjoyed the backstories and the vivid imagery of the Manchukuo zoo that Nutmeg's father worked in, but I was not attached to these new characters, nor did I think they truly moved the plot along apart from providing Toru with the well once more. I was also let down by Noboru Wataya's character. I guess he does his job acting as Toru's polar opposite in every sense, but despite the novel bringing up his rise to power frequently, I felt that his characterisation was quite weak. He represents these darker elements of humanity (in opposition to Toru's general goodwill and passivity) and Murakami uses him as a critique of Japanese politics. A cunning man who has trained to wear a mask to hide his depravity and to appeal to the masses, quickly gaining approval and power. He often felt more like an abstract threat and a metaphor, rather than a concrete villain as he was implied to be considering the responsibility he has in Kumiko's departure from Toru which kickstarts the entire novel.
by bernabeth