The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami

Noboru Wataya glanced at his watch in order to ascertain that the world was still spinning on its axis and costing him precious time.

Do you know the story of the monkeys of shitty island? I asked Noboru Wataya.
He shook his head, with no sign of interest. Never heard of it.
Somewhere, far, far away, there's a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts, after which they shit the world's foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It's an endless cycle.
I drank the rest of my coffee.

Well, how can I put this? Sometimes, when I'm looking at you, I get this feeling like maybe you're fighting real hard against something for me. I know this sounds weird, but when that happens, I feel like I"m right with you, sweating with you. See what I mean? You always look so cool, like no matter what happens, it's got nothing to do with you, but you're not really like that. In your own way, you're out there fighting as hard as you can, even if other people can't tell by looking at you. If you weren't, you wouldn't have gone into the well like that, right? But anyhow, you're not fighting for me, of course. You're falling all over yourself, trying to wrestle with this big whatever-it-is, and the only reason you're doing it is so you can find Kumiko. So there's no point in me getting all sweaty for you. I know all that, but still, I can't help feeling that you are fighting for me, Mr Wind-up Bird--that, in a way, you are probably fighting for a lot of other people at the same time you're fighting for Kumiko. And that's maybe why you look like an absolute idiot sometimes. That's what I think, Mr Wind-up Bird. But when I see you doing this, I get all tense and nervous, and I end up feeling totally drained. I mean, it looks like you can't possibly win. If i had to bet on the match, I'd be on you to lose. Sorry, but that's how it is. I like you a lot, but I don't want to go broke. 

He inherited from his mother's stories the fundamental style that he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual. The question of which parts of a story were factual and which were not was not a very important one for Cinnamon. The important question was not what his grandfather did but what his grandfather might have done. He learned the answer to this question as soon as he succeeded in telling the story.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle reminded me of something Salman Rushdie would write, only with more edges, or again, of something Isabelle Allende would write but not as much like a flowering plant (thorns or no thorns). It seems those historical chronicles that so often include magical realism, or those magical realism stories that just always seem to be historical chronicles, are mostly concerned with revealing the dirty secrets in our minds and our histories.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a story about wounds. Or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a story about fate. Or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a story about losing things. What most links the characters in Murakami's novel is their relation to Manchukuo, the puppet state Japan established in Manchuria in 1931-32. Perhaps because of their straightforward approach to incredible brutality or perhaps because of the tension between despair and hope in magical powers, the scenes and stories from this chapter of history are some of the most spell-binding in the book.

There are so many backwaters of history, little or large bits of the story that escape the notice of the mainstream history everyone is busy telling each other. Each culture, each nation has their own story they are telling, and as if by agreement they tell certain parts with grace and gusto so that other parts will go unnoticed. And it usually falls to the unofficial storytellers, the artists, to tell the omitted stories such as they find them. Because the artists can trick you into listening to a story you would otherwise have closed your ears to and run away from.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle gives you a sense of the hurt that society's framework is supposed to allow us all to hide and hold and function on with. To escape from his escaped wife Kumiko, Toru Okada goes to sit at the bottom of a well for three days because Lieutenant Mamiya was thrown into one, but May Kasahara decides to trap Toru down there because she wants to scare him because she's a crazy young girl because she wants to see how he will deal with it because she's fascinated by death because she likes the feeling of power because she might already be responsible for someone else's death. And this is only a tiny bit of the action, all of which seems to point to people who are trying to break out of the supporting framework because they want to know what their pain is like.

Toru can't seem to find a job (or make anything of himself), May doesn't go to school and counts bald men instead, Cinnamon doesn't speak, Kumiko runs away, Lieutenant Mamiya didn't die and can't fall in love, and the list goes on, all because they are people who don't want medication. Saying no mean thing against doctors, sometimes medication is not the thing the patient wants because the patient does not even want to be a patient. So everyone hopes that there really are some people who have superpowers and that maybe pain is like the snow that was general all over Dublin.