The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

This is the first novel I read by Haruki Murakami and it got me hooked on his writing.

Toru Okada is tasked with finding his lost cat but, as he searches, the past stories of other characters constantly intersect and become inescapable detours, which often foster ambiguity and a sense of becoming lost in a charmed world.

We’re left with an impression of a world slipping into the surreal, where reality becomes blurred like Okada’s memory of what his missing cat looks like, and where “Ten minutes is not ten minutes” because time can stretch and shrink. I was frequently… show more.

I first read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle at my first writing residency and it inspired me to keep writing stories that slip between worlds.

In Murakami’s story the protagonist searches for his missing cat after his wife disappears which leads him into a dark well where he slips into another world. Along the way he encounters a water diviner Malta Kano and a 14-year-old girl who surveys bald men for a living.

The story is woven with the recollection of Mr. Honda, a Japanese war veteran of atrocities in Manchuria. The otherworldliness of the worlds he encounters is described… show more.

Still my favorite Murakami.

I always appreciate how much he writes about classical music in his novels, but this is one where I especially felt the connection between the music written about and the form of the novel.

There was one beautiful moment where Mozart’s Magic Flute opera and the characters of this book collided and I experienced Mozart in a completely new way. Besides that, this book is just such a journey.

Arduous and lonely and beautiful, it moved and changed me.

A deeply engrossing story, where characters are transported back into time from contemporary Japan to zoos in Manchuria on the eve of Japan’s 1945 defeat. Although the narrative is disjointed, its characters are haunting, and the work is unforgettable. A mesmerizing tale by the greatest living novelist of Japan today.