The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
(Haruki Murakami)
?The Wind-up Bird Chronicle? chronicles the changes undergone by Toru Okada during approximately eighteen months of his life. Toru Okada is a tidy though unsual thirty-year old Tokyo suburbanite who has left his job and taken on the role of housekeeper for his small family of himself, his wife Kumiko and his missing cat. However, a bizarre and explicit phone call interrupts his spaghetti cooking one morning, the first of many abnormal occurrences which lead Toru on a journey towards discovery of his own character and that of his wife. This journey is helped along through Toru?s meetings with a number of similarly odd characters; a teenage girl obsessed with death, a pair of psychic sisters, a World War Two veteran, and a remarkably well dressed women running a private clinic for women with ?something? inside them. Central to the story is Toru?s brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya, a man who Toru detests and associates increasingly with the inexplicable disappearance of his wife Kumiko. Initially unsure how to react to his wife?s disappearance, Toru eventually resolves to find her ? but rather than searching for her in the real world he conducts his search at the bottom of a dry well, sliding through the well wall into a mazelike hotel where he is convinced the key to the mystery lies. The increasingly surreal novel is punctuated by fascinating stories set in the Japanese occupation of Manchuria which Toru feels are linked to him and somehow important for his destiny. His journey brings Toru into increasing conflict with the politically successful Noboru Wataya, and ultimately it becomes apparent that both need Kumiko for themselves, and only one of them can survive the struggle for possession of her. ?The Wind-up Bird Chronicle? is Murakami at his best, a gripping tale of suburban life turned upside-down.
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