The Wind-up Bird Chronicles

The Wind-up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami

Category: Novel Grade: B+

That's two by Murakami this summer and I think I'm becoming a fan. His books are definitely not for everybody - he's sort of a magical-realist. The two books I've read so far, this one and the much shorter After Dark, both blur the lines between reality and fantasy. Chronicles is probably the author's best known and definitely his longest book. It winds together a bunch of different plots lines - something I'm not usually in to. Here, the focus of the book is the narrator's disintegrating marriage, but there's also strange story lines about a teenage girl up the street, a very weird "psychic treatment", a charismatic Japanese politician and an involved story about violence during both of Japan's mid-centuries wars - with China and then with the Soviet Union. In spite of the book's 600 page length, Murakami, at least in this book, is amazingly efficient with his prose. The tiniest details come back to be wound in to the story later in the book. Ultimately, all of the story lines tie together in what, finally, is a beautiful, but disturbing book.

The writing is lyrical, even in translation. Most of the book is told in first person - it's the kind of book where you can hear the narrator telling you the story in a quiet voice. The translator, Jay Rubin, has apparently done most of Murakami's books and it's hard to imagine the talent required to take prose like this and make it poetic in another language. Reading Chronicles really made me wish I could read Japanese to see what this writing is like in the original.

This book isn't nearly as dense as the masterpiece of magical realism - One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez. If you liked Solitude, or if you always wanted to read something like it, but weren't willing to invest the effort to get through, you might like Chronicles. It's definitely enough to keep me moving through the Murakami library.