Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a mess, but a glorious, addictive, compulsively readable mess. Murakami begins his celebrated novel with a jumble of plot threads, most of them fairly mudane mysteries--where's the cat? who's making these mysterious calls? who's Malta Kano?--and he ends the novel with the majority of those threads untied (though the cat does return). And yet, despite the novel's lack of resolution and some very strange turns in the story (such as it is), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is filled with intense, brilliant snippets of narrative that are hard to forget--and oftentimes very hard to read.

I still remember the precise moment when I realized that I loved this book: at the conclusion of two lengthy chapters, entitled "Lieutenant Mamiya's Long Story: Part I" and "Part II," recounting Lieutenant Mamiya's horrific capture and torment at the hands of Russian soldiers in outer Mongolia. Murakami's story-telling talent settles each moment in almost unbearable vividness, from its relatively mundane settings, through a traumatizing, blood-spattered episode, to a sun-parched epiphany at the bottom of a dry well.

And yet, while Lieutenant Mamiya's story (or parts thereof) is frequently invoked throughout the course of the book, it is hardly the book's central concern. Indeed, it is a story told by a friend of a friend of the narrator, Toru Okada, a 30-year-old man whose only connection with the Russo-Japanese war is through war stories, like this one, told by tired old men. When the book opens, his thoughts are far away from the narrow well near Mongolia where Lieutenant Mamiya briefly gains and then loses his life's salvation. Instead, Okada is concerned about his long unemployment, his missing cat, and the mysterious cologne he smells on his wife's neck. He is also concerned, of course, about these brief phone calls he keeps receiving from a mysterious woman, who, in one early, hilarious passage (the first of many, strangely if effectively juxtaposed with sub-narratives of shocking brutality and despair) engages in unilateral phone sex with the hapless Okada.

This is not to say that the book's central narrative--which concerns Toru Okada's increasingly tenuous grasp on reality as forces outside his control intrude on his otherwise orderly life--lacks verve of its own. One of Okada's early arguments with his wife, Kumiko, is totally mundane and therefore wrenchingly authentic. Okada's creepy dreams of a pitch-black hotel room nearly veer into the horror genre with their uncanny eeriness. And Okada's friendship with the young May Kasahara is very sweet (thought faintly pedophilic--in an early scene he remarks on her "incredibly tiny chocolate-colored bikini, its little cloth patches held in place by bits of string").

An incredible proportion of this book, however, is taken up with seemingly peripheral tales only tenuously connected to Okada's story--and the vast majority of these tales are traumatically brutal, almost inhumanly so. A lot of them are war stories, including Mirayama's tales, the various zoo scenes, and the baseball massacre. Those that are not war stories nevertheless have that flavor, especially Creta Kano's harrowing autobiography. Almost uniformly, these "external" stories, as well as the individual narratives that make up Okada's life, are compellingly, page-turningly readable, in their own bizarre way. But they fail to add up to any sort of cohesive whole. It's true that Murakami does ramp up Okada's story near the end, with some explanations of the curious events going on in Okada's life, but neither Murakami's conclusions nor his explanations make any real sense. In fact, they make absolutely no sense at all--nor do they linger in one's memory in the same way as the more interesting sub-stories prior to and surrounding the surreal ending.

If there's any unity to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, it's not narrative, but thematic. Although it's hard to articulate, there are definitely underlying currents tying together the disparate pieces of Murakami's book; the book has a clear emotional story arc, even though the narrative story arc is scattered and sometimes distracted. And it is this torrent of emotions, dispensed in all-too-brief nuggets of intense story-telling, that stays with you long after this brilliant muddle of a book finally ends.

P.S. A word about the translation, by Jay Rubin. I have long had a problem with English translations of Japanese novels--to me, they always seem stilted, listless, both overly formal and overly colloquial, the inconsistent result of a translator struggling too hard to stick to the grammatical structure of the original text while forgetting its animating spirit. The translation of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is no better. Although the book ends up rising above its translation (and, to be fair, the translation also sometimes rose above my expectations), the failure to attain a uniformly excellent English text is a real shame.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu