Braden Solt reviewed The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Review of 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
This enchanting saga will have you feeling like you're at the bottom of deep well
Epub
English language
Published Oct. 6, 1998 by Vintage International.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force—and one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.
In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II. Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/118727/the-wind-up-bird-chronicle-by-haruki-murakami/9780307762702
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force—and one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.
In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II. Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/118727/the-wind-up-bird-chronicle-by-haruki-murakami/9780307762702
This enchanting saga will have you feeling like you're at the bottom of deep well
Weird and brilliant, the book constantly tempts you into decoding it’s meaning, and then immediately pulls the rug out from under your mind-feet.
I also felt like I needed a giant white board to track the seemingly endless inter-connections, parallels, and metaphors, but I’m not sure a large enough white board exists, and even if it did I’d probably just end up with a giant mess of ideas rendered less beautiful than the novel itself. All that said, his writing about female sexuality is weird and deeply uncomfortable.