I first encountered the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in short story form in The Elephant Vanishes. The first entry of the latter short story collection is the first chapter of this novel. I also started and stopped this book about eight months ago for reasons I can't remember - in that first attempt, I read just the first chapter. So when I picked up the book a second time and started anew (from the beginning = very good place to start), it was actually the third time I had read the tale of an out-of-work law clerk looking for his cat in an alley while his wife was at work. I think my own stumbling start to this novel reinforced the greatness of its primary quality, the nagging "this is a familiar dream" feeling that comes with reading Murakami's wispy, often surreal prose. But it also reinforced a complaint that I have encountered upon reading several reviews of the book, namely that this trippy faux-detective story often reads as a patchwork of short-stories clearly written a t different times and places. After some reflection, I think I agree with both sentiments, but feel that the disconnectedness of the vignettes in the story keyed the novel's portrayal of life, and that while TWUBC may be missing an element of "tightness" that most great novels strive for, the dreamy looseness is its defining quality.
The plot of the book - though really you should be going to wikipedia for that type of thing - is a man who among other things loses a cat, receives bizarre phone calls, befriends a bizarre teenage girl down the street, gets in touch with psychics, battles with his celeb-politician brother-in-law, has his wife run away, talks with a World War II veteran of the Japan-Russian front, participates in a strange cult-ritual healing exercise (where he is a kind of health-prostitute), fades in and out of dreams, and perhaps most memorably, spends a large amount of time at the bottom of a dried up well. Phew - that should give some kind of taste of the non-linear, entirely non-standard reality take being presented here. Toru Okada, aka "Mr. Wind-Up Bird," slides through a life that barely makes an effort to differentiate between asleep and awake. He also cooks spaghetti.
The first surprise is the shockingly mundane existence the protagonist leads. The novel covers a course of about a year and a half, the bulk of which Okada spends unemployed. His daily exploits are detailed, but consist of cooking spaghetti, fixing sandwiches, going for walks, people-watching and the like. There is a large amount of what might be referred to as "dead air" taking up the pages of the novel, but Murakami's rendering keeps these pages from going stale. They really create a pastoral rhythm that serves as a bubbling stream backdrop to the spike events that occur in his life. The action exists, to be sure, but the power of the surreal-in-the-mundane exposition gives the novel its unique feel.
The other notable aspect of Okada is that he has to be the most passive person on earth. A major symbol of the narrative is the wind-up bird, a mysterious unseen bird with a call that sounds like the winding of a spring. Only certain characters can hear the bird, and it's "winding up" occurs at points of the novel which set major cascades of important events into motion. So the wind-up bird represents a sort of unstoppable force of nature, a character who winds up the tension of fate to release it to inevitability. And Okada seems to succumb to this inevitability with barely a care - his wife disappears under bizarre circumstances, and though he plainly desires to find her and take her back, his efforts are swallowed up by sitting on the couch, drinking beer and contemplating. One scene that stood out in terms of Okada's passivity occurred between Okada and his borderline comically evil brother-in-law. The BIL lays into Okada, essentially calling his entire life worthless, with language that would inspire your average midwesterner to request a stepping outside. But Okada silently takes it, mulls it over, and delivers a reserved comeback. This is not to say that Okada is a wimp - he does deliver that comeback, and in a later scene of the novel finds, when pressed, the strength to beat a man to a bloody pulp with a baseball bat - but his reserved manner, his acceptance of the ebbs and flows of his life, are striking. Even the most bizarre course of events elicit barely a blink from Okada.
And this facet is key to the novel, because the bizarre cavalcade that assaults Okada's life would only have been tolerable to the most patient, accepting of people. Plus it lends the novel its mystic air - the winding of psychics, dreams, mysterious hallucinatory hotel rooms and healing rituals are met head-on by a mundane, "well this is how it is" response. The reader is sucked into Okada's level of passivity, and the normal level of rejection of the absurd doesn't occur. The reader accepts the status quo of the narrative, even at the height of its strangeness.
And even strangeness could get boring, were it not for Murakami's vivid portrayals. Again, true enough that many of the stories-within-the-story stick out as items dropped in from above, but I felt that the non-sequitur element of these stories' inclusion highlighted the dream-narrative aspects of the novel as a whole. And some of these seemingly external-to-the-main-plot sequences are the best parts of the novel. There's a horrifying account of a man witnessing a fellow soldier skinned alive, of a man being buried in a dried-up well in the middle of the desert and left to die, and most strikingly, an account of Japanese soldiers ordered to kill zoo animals to preserve food resources during the dying stages of the war. While these stories, granted, are not germane to he central Okada-looks-for-his-wife narrative, they do tie in wonderfully with the wind-up bird concept, that wound springs set off an unchangeable course of events - often culminating in horror.
This story is not for the faint. It's weird, hallucinatory and sex-violent-horrible in parts. And its nonlinear quality, plus its protagonist who is clearly operating on a non-standard, non-western, and non-identity-oriented level, may be too foreign (ha!) for some American readers. There's an extended relationship between the 30 year old main character and a fifteen year old girl that walks the "inappropriate" line throughout the novel, and if that sort of unusual relationship would turn you off, then don't bother; you're not open enough for this experience. For the rest, though, I recommend it. I don't equate it with some of the best novels by Pynchon and the like as some do, mainly because the complexity in this novel is easily dissectable as patchwork. So I suppose the lack of "tied-upedness" did bother me slightly. It also has a couple of groan moments of pomo-icity, e.g. "I felt like a character in a novel." Ugh. Still, for the dreamy experience, and for an unadorned look at an alternate way of viewing things, this dreamscape does the trick. You don't even need to read it at the bottom of a well to get that much.
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