'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' by Haruki Murakami

Allow me to start by explaining what happened to this book’s beautiful shoji-inspired dust jacket. This time two weeks ago it was raining rather heavily here, in the North East, and because I had very cleverly left the house without an umbrella, or even a jacket, I was forced to use my special hardback edition of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami as a makeshift parapluit. As you can most likely imagine, what with water and paper being such a disastrous combination and all, the dust jacket turned delightfully soggy and is now, at the very least, semi-ruined. Damn.

As for the book itself, while I am no stranger to the work of Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was nevertheless very surprising. First published in three volumes as Nijimaki-dori kuronikuru between 1994 and 1995 in Murakami’s native Japan, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a huge, sprawling novel, at once stylish and surreal, and along with the immensely popular Norwegian Wood it is one of Haruki Murakami’s most recognised works. How to categorise a work as bold and inherently weird as this is no easy task, however, and the best I can really do is to give you a brief outline of the book’s unusual format.

Although collected here in one volume, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle still retains its original three book format. Book One is dubbed The Thieving Magpie, Book Two Bird as Prophet, and Book Three is titled The Birdcatcher. Books One and Two are thirteen and sixteen chapters long respectively, while Book Three weighs in at a rather bloated thirty-nine chapters, and unsurprisingly this third and last part does indeed begin to drag somewhat. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is similar in structure to Murakami’s most recent outing, 1Q84, and the two works do touch on similar themes and veer into similarly science fiction territory.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is certainly the strangest of Murakami’s works that I have read so far, with everything from the character’s names to the preponderance of animal imagery being positively steeped in weird. It lacks the emotional depth and intriguing characterisation that made Norwegian Wood so memorable, however what it lacks in depth it more than makes up for in scope and utter originality. To borrow a line from page 308, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle feels rather like ‘a bold surrealistic painting hung on a white wall.’

This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in October 2012.