Title of the Novel

The following quote about the wind-up bird suggests that it is rather a menacing omen:

“The cry of this bird was audible only to certain people, who were guided by it toward inescapable ruin” (525). 

It appears that those certain people have the same blue mark on their faces as Toru Okada and Cinnamon have.

What, in your opinion, is the meaning, or clues to the meaning, of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle?"

Feelings & Grisly Images

At the end of the second book, I observed that Murakami has ceased to conceal Toru Okada’s emotions.  In other words, the novelist has unfolded some of the deeper, more suppressed feelings and inner struggles of Toru Okada.  However incomprehensible they may seem, the audience is able to understand that on the inside, this man is much more impacted and disturbed by the disappearance of his cat and his wife than one would have thought possible. 

I think that the stories told by other characters like Lieutenant Mamiya are not only important in terms of contextual information and setting an oftentimes threatening, haunting, and confusing scene, but also help Toru Okada on his unconsciously desperate search for his identity and understanding of the world around him, from which he has almost isolated himself. 

Perhaps the outburst of anger as he smashes the guitarist with the baseball bat at the end of the second book reflects how confused and tormented he is within, and that he is somehow lost and helpless.  I found this quote revealing:

“The man could no longer get to his feet.  But I couldn’t stop.  There were two of me now, I realized.  I had split in two, but this me had lost the power to stop the other me.  An intense chill ran through my body.  Then I realized the man was smiling” (336). 

Toru has come to understand that he is not himself at the moment.  He is a split character; putting the two halves together would require an immense effort.  One of the halves has more reason than the other, we may say, telling him that he has defended himself and ought not to keep smashing the smirking corpse.  The other half, I believe, is an extension of the tumult inside him, where reason is of no importance and where limits are meaningless because crossing them brings no sense of guilt or relief and where one limit overflows into the next. 

Although the sentences are still as short as in the beginning, they have become somewhat more powerful and less superficial.  Patterns also start to emerge.  For instance, the word “realize” appears twice, suggesting that Toru Okada starts to observe himself in a different light than before, becoming aware of both his split identity and the danger of the world around him.  Also, the intense chill followed by the observation that the man is smiling creates an ominous setting and escalates the tension.  To encapsulate, Murakami uses short sentences both to describe the ordinary setting at the beginning and the rather lurking one that is intervened in order to highlight how difficult it is for Toru to distinguish between menace and harmlessness.  I thought that the smile is a symbol of the rather evil forces that come into play and blend reality and imagination together.

The confusion and sense of being lost between two worlds haunts Toru.  Perhaps he feels that he cannot escape whatever haunts him.  Especially the atrocities of war told by the Lieutenant have a firm grip on him as he finds out more about his culture.  As Alia mentioned before, the skinning of Yamamoto is a gruesome picture of violence.  The following quote emphasizes the conflict within Toru as he attempts to comprehend the ghastliness of what human beings are capable of doing to one another:

“… but my legs wouldn’t move.  The skin reached my feet and began to crawl upward.  It crept over my own skin clinging to mine as an overlay.  The heavy smell of blood was everywhere.  Soon, my legs, my body, my face, were entirely covered by the thin membrane of the man’s skin.  Then my eyes could no longer see, and the man’s laughter reverberated in the hollow darkness” (338). 

Like in the deep well later in the book when the water rises, or when the person in the dark room stabs at him with a knife, Toru is paralyzed, unable to move.  There is a deep sense of helplessness, creating pathos, as he cannot move, especially in the face of inevitable danger.  The image of the crawling skin is so vividly painted in the reader’s mind and underlines the horridness of Toru’s nightmare of the guitarist skinning himself.  His helplessness is intensified by his inability to see and the overpowering laughter creeping into the darkness under the man’s skin and over Toru’s. 

I believe that being tormented by dreadful images and confusing feelings, Toru finds out more about his culture and his suppressed self and is able to realize that he wants Kumiko back in his life.  He senses that she is in the grip of another world, yet he is determined not to let her vanish from his world. 

What is the importance of the baseball bat?  

Cats and Noburu Wataya

I have three cats at home, Zelda, Ziggy & Assad, and they all know their names and (usually) come when called. (Above are Ziggy - on the left - and Assad). Like Murakami, I really like cats, and suspect they are very wise as well as independent. Jean Cocteau said that a cat is "the visible soul of the house" - and perhaps this explains why Toru and Kumiko's cat mysteriously disappeared - the house had lost its soul. I found this tribute to someone's special cat on another blog (gingerblue.com):

"She kept me company through many lonely nights in graduate school. She’s sat in many windows, peering out into the darkness waiting for me (now, for all of us) to come home. She quietly moves through the house with her tail up and her nose sniffing. If she gets antsy, she’ll yowl. But not often. She greets us all every morning with drawn-out blinks of her beautiful copper eyes and a quiet calm, unlike the other two cats, who yowl and howl and demand breakfast."

 When Toru's cat comes back after a year away it is a wonderful piece about the consolation the cat gives him after his months of isolation and loneliness. Here's just an extract:

"Holding this soft, small living creature in my lap this way, though, and seeing how it slept with complete trust in me, I felt a warm rush in my chest. I put my hand on the cat's chest and felt his heart beating. The pulse was faint and fast, but his heart, like mine, was ticking off the time allotted to his small body with all the restless earnestness of my own.” (378)

This connection between Toru and his cat, as between any human being and an animal, strikes me as quite miraculous. Without speech there is a bond, sometimes stronger and deeper than between human beings because maybe language gets in the way.

So, Toru's cat is given a new name, Mackerel, and the old association with the horrid brother-in-law is over. Kumiko's brother's character seems to epitomize the fake sincerity of a lot of tv people, especially politicians. He is a 'hollow man' and an evil presence in the novel, the antagonist in effect. In the long section about Noboru Wataya there was a comment about him (and similar people) that I really liked:

"It seems to me that certain patterns of thought are so simple and one-sided that they become irresistible" (74)

This is what makes NW so massively popular in the media, I think. Toru implies this habit of thinking came from NW's mother who:

" ...whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question 'How do I look?' . . . Anything that failed to enter her narrow field of vision ceased to have meaning for her." (75)

I have met quite a lot of people like this - who because they are too lazy to find out for themselves either steal/borrow other people's opinions - or just lift opinions from others that fit their prejudices or their place in society. One wonders if such people really know how to think at all. However, this is a little different than what NW does (1st quote) where Murakami is highlighting how easy it is to adopt one-sided simple opinions on issues. In fact, as Oscar Wilde said, "The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

Intriguing Quote: Book 1 page 128

I was away from internet for quite a while and so as I was reading the novel I was not able to immediately publish posts as soon as I stumbled upon interesting passages. I did however make note of a particular quote in the first book which I found to be extremely intriguing. In this part of the novel, Toru Okada has recently found Kumiko's new Christian Dior eau de cologne and finds himself extremely puzzled. He does not understand who could have possibly given her such a gift. What is interesting in all of this is that a simple bottle of perfume detains a vast range of possible stories. Since he does not know the truth, this small bottle begins to haunt him. Instead of being a mere beauty product, his mind transforms it into a barrier between Kumiko and him. With all of this in mind, Toru says, "Now, however, it had taken on the thin veil of secrecy." (Page 128) The most interesting part of this quote is the fact that he compares secrecy to a thin veil. When I think of the concept of secrecy, the first image that comes to mind is a large wall or a barrier because to me, it represents the unknown and the unattainable. Toru Okada however, compares it to a subtle and discrete object that is extremely mobile and simple to touch. He introduces another facet of secrecy; by referring to it as a thin veil, he makes it all the more dangerous. By alluding to a thin veil, Toru Okada emphasizes the fact that it is very easy to fall into a world of secrecy (one suspicious object can create barriers between two people). At this point, he begins to suspect Kumiko and starts to scrutinize every one of her actions. The discovery of the bottle of perfume has caused him to "touch" the veil of secrecy and to overanalyze any situation concerning his wife. 

May Kasahara and Death

There was a certain theme in the last few scenes of Book Two which caught my attention, although it really only involved May Kasahara speaking about death. When Toru was down in the well and she found him, she told him, "You might die down there, depending on my mood. I'm the only one who knows you're in there, and I'm the one who hid the rope ladder... If I just walked away from here, you'd end up dead..." (p.254) When Toru (and the reader) realizes this, he doesn't seem too concerned, because he doesn't really believe May would do something like that, although she is right, and his life depends on her. She seems so enthusiastic about the fact that it is so easy for her to leave him there to die, and this seems weird. How she feels about having a life depend on her. Then Murakami changes the tone of the scene and May becomes a scarier character; "I'm not talking about possibility," she said in the coldest tone imaginable. "Hey, I've got an idea... You went to all this trouble of climbing down there so you could think. Why don't I fix it so you can concentrate on your thoughts even better?" (p.255) And then she closes the cover of the well completely. This ends the chapter on the eeriest note possible, because she'd just been talking about leaving Toru there to die, and closing the well completely makes her words become more believable.

But May seems to be very interested in death. She researches about how long it would take for someone to die of hunger or thirst, and predicts how long Toru has to live if she leaves him there. There's a quote that she says that I really liked, because I'd never thought about it before, "If people lived forever - if they never got any older - if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy - do you think they'd bother to think hard about things, the way we're doing now? I mean, we think about just about everything, more or less... I kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, that complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world." (p.258) It's a very interesting idea, especially because I agree; if we were immortal, we would probably never think about such complicated things, because we wouldn't care, we wouldn't have to. As May says later on, "Or even if they should bother, they'd probably just figure, 'Oh well, I've got plenty of time for that. I'll think about it later.' But we can't wait until later." (p.258) These are Murakami's ideas transmitted through May's character, and they impact the reader, especially because death is a prominent idea in the book right now, since Toru is trapped in a well with no food and little water. 

Murakami Quotes

Akshay got me going on Murakami quotes... Here's a link with quotes from different novels, selected by his many enthusiastic readers...

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3354.Haruki_Murakami

The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami (New York Times)

Interesting and entertaining New York Times article about Murakami as representative of Japanese culture (or rather, not...) Details, also, of his latest magnum opus 1Q84 and rumours of a nobel prize... Thankyou, Ms. Cox for sharing this!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/the-fierce-imagination-of-haruki-murakami.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

I have two quotes from the article that might help shed light on the writer:

"The signature pleasure of a Murakami plot is watching a very ordinary situation (riding an elevator, boiling spaghetti, ironing a shirt) turn suddenly extraordinary (a mysterious phone call, a trip down a magical well, a conversation with a Sheep Man) — watching a character, in other words, being dropped from a position of existential fluency into something completely foreign and then being forced to mediate, awkwardly, between those two realities. A Murakami character is always, in a sense, translating between radically different worlds: mundane and bizarre, natural and supernatural, country and city, male and female, overground and underground. His entire oeuvre, in other words, is the act of translation dramatized."

"He is notoriously obsessed with metaphors of depth: characters climbing down empty wells to enter secret worlds or encountering dark creatures underneath Tokyo’s subway tunnels. (He once told an interviewer that he had to stop himself from using well imagery, after his eighth novel, because the frequency of it was starting to embarrass him.) He imagines his own creativity in terms of depth as well. Every morning at his desk, during his trance of total focus, Murakami becomes a Murakami character: an ordinary man who spelunks the caverns of his creative unconscious and faithfully reports what he finds.
    'I live in Tokyo,' he told me, 'a kind of civilized world — like New York or Los Angeles or London or Paris. If you want to find a magical situation, magical things, you have to go deep inside yourself. So that is what I do. People say it’s magic realism — but in the depths of my soul, it’s just realism. Not magical. While I’m writing, it’s very natural, very logical, very realistic and reasonable.'”