Sunday night I finished reading Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.”
It’s one of those books that you come across in the bookstore by total serendipity and turns into an instant favourite. I found this book while combing through an ‘Author Recommends’ section in the bookstore. I think it was Dennis Bock who put this on his favourite’s list.
As Jackie can attest as soon as I started reading this book, I was hooked. The set up’s fairly simple, a man Tora Okadu goes in search of his missing cat Noboru Wataya. Where the story goes from there is astoundingly complex invoking a myriad of oddball characters, elements of macabre magic realism, Japanese pop-culture, pseudo-transcendentalism and historical politics circa World War II with Japan’s Manchuria campaign.
How Murakami brings these elements together is seamless, but at the same time, he’s equally adept at letting all the heterogeneous pieces fall apart just as easily; the image that comes to mind is a giant lego tower, a self-consciously unstable pop-culture artifice that could come crashing down at any time.
Where Pynchon seems willfully post-modern as though consciously attempting to deny meaning, Murakami’s writing seems totally unaware that the purpose of writing is to distill a kind of meaning. In some ways, Murakami plays each character and angle of his story as though they weren’t interrelated parts realized into a whole, but simply separate strands of stories that occasionally come together through, well, serendipity.
While I can see how some might find this unsatisfying, I found it mesmerizing and am still thinking about all the directions “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” went. Fortunately, for my early birthday, Jackie bought me a bunch more of his novels. A great author I’m glad I discovered.
It’s one of those books that you come across in the bookstore by total serendipity and turns into an instant favourite. I found this book while combing through an ‘Author Recommends’ section in the bookstore. I think it was Dennis Bock who put this on his favourite’s list.
As Jackie can attest as soon as I started reading this book, I was hooked. The set up’s fairly simple, a man Tora Okadu goes in search of his missing cat Noboru Wataya. Where the story goes from there is astoundingly complex invoking a myriad of oddball characters, elements of macabre magic realism, Japanese pop-culture, pseudo-transcendentalism and historical politics circa World War II with Japan’s Manchuria campaign.
How Murakami brings these elements together is seamless, but at the same time, he’s equally adept at letting all the heterogeneous pieces fall apart just as easily; the image that comes to mind is a giant lego tower, a self-consciously unstable pop-culture artifice that could come crashing down at any time.
Where Pynchon seems willfully post-modern as though consciously attempting to deny meaning, Murakami’s writing seems totally unaware that the purpose of writing is to distill a kind of meaning. In some ways, Murakami plays each character and angle of his story as though they weren’t interrelated parts realized into a whole, but simply separate strands of stories that occasionally come together through, well, serendipity.
While I can see how some might find this unsatisfying, I found it mesmerizing and am still thinking about all the directions “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” went. Fortunately, for my early birthday, Jackie bought me a bunch more of his novels. A great author I’m glad I discovered.
