The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle may well be the oddest book I’ve ever read. Over more than 600 pages, Haruki Mruakami weaves and winds this opus, featuring people who may or may not exist, hidden secrets of World War II, and sexual desire that seems, at times, uncomfortable or illicit or just plain odd… all told from the point of view of a protagonist who has very little impetus or agency at all.
And yet I loved it.
This book isn’t without its faults. This GoodReads review made me laugh out loud for the way it perfectly encapsulates the meandering of the storyline. Sometimes, I wondered if Murakami knew where he was going with the various threads in the storyline; sometimes, I wondered if he just needed a good editor. I put it down for several months (of course, part of that came from the fact that I was physically separated from my copy for several months…), and at times, I wondered if I would “get it” more if I read it again.
And yet.
Murakami has a way with magical realism that I envy. He has a unique method of weaving stories just this side of the fantastical without ever feeling the need or the inclination to explain what’s real, what isn’t, what’s actually happened and what hasn’t. He doesn’t tie the story up in a nice, neat bow (though this one, more than some of his others, like After Dark, does have, for lack of a better word, a conclusion of sorts.) The myriad strands don’t come together in a unifying ending… but the final few pages do show the reader what the book is really about, and this somehow manages to lend the labyrinthine reading experience a satisfying finality.