The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
Harvill trd pbk, 609pp, £12.00
Review by Gerald Houghton (1998)
My dictionary defines existentialism as 'a philosophical theory emphasising that man is responsible for his own actions and free to choose his development and destiny.' Which means resisting the urge to call the latest from Japan’s Haruki Murakami an existential detective story. The man in this case is Toru Okada - Mr Wind-Up Bird - a thirty-something former law firm clerk. He gave that job up. But that was just about the last free choice he made. It started because their cat disappeared. His wife Kumiko calls on Malta Kano, a psychic who imparts messages so oblique as to be next to useless, and whose sister, Creta, is even less transparent.
Is it crime fiction? Sf? A thriller? Magic Realism? All of the above? The obvious (and not so obvious) comparisons have all been drawn. The two Raymonds, Chandler and Carver (not the least because Murakami has translated both). Ballard is there, as are Pynchon and Dick. Don DeLillo too, because you always compare the incomparable to DeLillo. And, of course, Paul Auster and Jonathan Carroll. Because Auster and Carroll have staked this territory best: the metaphysical detective plotting of the former’s eerie New York Trilogy; the spiritual questing of the latter’s entire oeuvre. Its dream sequences (and, oh, how there are dream sequences) look to be torn straight from the pages of the David Lynch Book of Obscure Symbolism.
Murakami tends toward the episodic more than any of the Americans, though. And this book especially is not driven by its ostensible hero, but has its plot brought to him by the author’s huge and maddeningly enigmatic cast. (But for a scant few pages, Toru Okada never leaves the row of houses in which he lives.) A cast like Lieutenant Mamiya, the one-handed vet from the failed 1939 Nomonhan campaign, who found enlightenment at the bottom of a dried-up well. Like Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka, mother-and-son fashion designers with their own inscrutable agenda. Like Kumiko’s scary academic-cum-right-wing-politician brother, Noboru Wataya. And like Kumiko herself, who leaves her husband half-way through this immense book, refusing to speak to him again except online.
‘This reminded me of several so-called art films I had seen in college. Movies like that never explained what was going on.’
Harvill’s translation (by Jay Rubin) is more readable than the Penguin edition of Dance, Dance, Dance, but all the care in the world is never going to decode the essential otherness of Murakami’s epic meditation on war, pain, loyalty, dreams and the nature of reality itself. Still, if you have the time and patience for it, his world is enthralling.