The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

I haven’t had a chance to read much lately, I’ve been busy writing, which is good I guess, but if you don’t read you’ll never be a very good writer.

I knew a good Murakami novel would make me drop what I was doing and start reading again, so a couple weeks back I solicited the advice of friends, drank a few glasses of whiskey and hit Amazon.com (what’s the point of the internet if not to shop drunk in your pajamas?) and came away with both Norwegian Wood and this one.

I started with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle because Mike said it was weird. And he’s right about that. At times it’s reasonably normal, but then something starts to go slightly awry in that magically strange way that only Murakami really knows how to pull off. And I don’t by magical mean to imply some sort of magical realism, which this is most definitely not, but rather that world in which everything is just a bit more meaningful and a bit more "off" than the one we normally inhabit.

And this is the first time I’ve seen Murakami tackle actual history (here it’s Japan’s involvement in Manchuria just prior to WWII) and he handles it well, not romanticizing and not dry, proving that even the past can work its way into what I like to call A Murakami World where almost nothing is what you expect.

By turns quite beautiful and yet brutal as well, this is definitely one of his best. I think in the end I still prefer Kafka on the Shore, but The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a very very close second.