THE WIND UP BIRD CHRONICLE BY HARUKI MURAKAMI

“The best way to think about reality was to get far away from it possible- a place like the bottom of a well for example.”

If there was any line that could boil down the essence of the book, then this was it. “The wind up bird Chronicle” that is translated by Jay Rubin , a professor of Japanese literature in Harvard, is a strange and surreal book that dances in genres like magical realism, deals with elements of gore- the macabre and the grotesque and bubbles with questions of philosophy and embraces wholly the realm of well, sheer unbelievable events.
It starts out simply enough. A cat with a bent tail that was named after the protagonist’s brother in law has disappeared from the house. A bird that visits their tree and sounds like the winding of a toy, for them the arrival of spring, creaks regularly. Our protagonist, Mr. Toru Okada- a normal man of a seemingly normal world is cooking and listening to opera. Unknown to him, the disappearance of the cat was going to shower down in this world of his with a chain of events and meetings that lead him to a path of self-discovery, of acceptance and rebellion of/ with urban alienation that all of us suffer from, maybe just a little.
The cat was the tip of the ice berg. It was adopted into the home immediately after their marriage and it’s disappearance signified a deeper problem, a distance that had sprung up between Kumiko and Toru okada (wife and husband, the latter that simply left it’s resolution to the passage of time) over the years. You wouldn’t know that though. You will unassumingly, with him, travel along the neighborhood, searching for the feline and discover the alley with closed ends. You will see him meet up with strange women, past and present- psychic sisters and corporals and a 16yr old girl obsessed with the philosophy of death, all that seem to teach him different things and hint vaguely at the chaotic time about to come, share experiences and events in the military history of the country, warn him to be careful of water and that he should collaborate with the flow. Remember how sometimes in each of our lives this flow stagnates, has it’s up’s and downs and how you should always learn to give into this energy instead of fighting it. Stuff that we youngsters would laugh at and so did he and wife then.
The plot is complicated because clearly logic seems to have flown the coop when this writer sat down to writing the story.
Mr okada is without a job and after meetings with the whimsical psychic sisters- Malta and Crete Kano (named after islands in the Mediterranean) soon finds himself without a wife. Clichéd as it might be, the character begins with a basic question- how well can we truly know someone? Is our sense of reality that fixed? Is that why betrayal comes off as a hard blow? Did he even know his wife? And will he ever in the end?
The book follows his descent into confusion and loneliness and his attempt in understanding the effect imperialism had left on the country and what it means to his search for his better half. Lieutenant Mamiya comes into the picture and talks to him about how on an mission he was left to die, but could not. Not that he would not, but could not. A corporal Honda (the couple spent time with the retired Mr. Honda and heard similar stories) predicted this before the event and how while he was thrown in the bottom of the well with no hopes of surviving , lost his essence or “the very core of his existence” in being bathed by a couple of seconds of intense morning light. He sensed a loss of reality and the expansion of time that is eventually used by Toru in another dry well next to the 16yr old girl’s (May Kasahara) house to think hard and long about the strange events. He is thrown into a dream sequence(Or did it happen in reality, or both) that is repeated throughout the book, where the voice of the woman who places sexual calls to him and claims he knows her very well, melds with that of his wife’s body and Creta Kano. And as always, there lies a bottle of Cutty Sark, Good Scottish Whisky, with ice on the side. The dream remains unfinished and supposedly hides something from him, the reason where his wife is and what he should do. You feel his loneliness. You feel for him as he tumbles along to get sense of his life again.
When he ends up leaving the well, delayed as May Kasahara had drawn up the ladder, he notices a strange blue black mark on his right cheek, warmer than the rest of the skin that changes intensity according to the depth of revelations he comes across.
The rest of the book deals with this quest to finish it and to reach a division with a physical and mental self, to withdraw in whichever one benefits him at that point. Creta kano tells him of how she was defiled by Noboru Wataya (his photogenic repulsive brother in law) and halts her path as a prostitute of the flesh and begins one as a prostitute of the mind, with help from her sister. He soon becomes the latter helping another eclectic duo- a mother and her son who use their mind as a conduit or a container for a person’s essence to pass through, and if there is anything wrong with it to fix it.

The bizarre plot leaves you flabbergasted. There are newspaper clippings and letters, emails and reminisces. Metaphysics flows throughout the book and you aware of a trance or dream like quality of the book. Mr murakami does not answer each question that arises and even though he manages to bring back his wife and figure out who the strange caller was, the events together in the end do not all add up.

Despite that being a fault, you will enjoy the surreal ride that he takes you through. It’s not every day a book comes along with a cat, opera music, Beatles, isolation in a dry well, psychics, odd jobs like counting the no of bald men in a city, stories of human skinning to present answers of duality of personalities and the quest of a wife.

PALLAVI JUNEJA
2 A