Appreciation: Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Reading Haruki Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle, I sometimes had to remind myself that it's held in high esteem in Japan. This is not to say it's a bore; rather, on a page-by-page basis, it's a lot of fun. Murakami knows how to spin a story, in the sense of making you ask "what happens next?" But I believe I read somewhere that he starts out not knowing where his characters are going to go. He might have been bragging; Dickens said something the same of himself, and Murakami probably wouldn't mind keeping such company. But in Murakami's case, I think it has to be counted a defect. In the end, he makes no more thn perfunctory effort to draw them all together. We are left with what reads more like a collection of classroom exercises, elegant in their way, but lacking any sense of a larger whole.

Yet some general themes emerge in spite of all. One is the pervading influence of western culture--not just American; a theme from Rossini's Thieving Magpie comes as close as anything to being a motif in this book. It might be just Murakami; I'm inclined to suspect thst it's more general and indeed, might explain his popularity with Japanese readers.

Another "recurrence" (if not exactly a theme) is the persistent passivity of the protagonist. Granted novelistic protagonists are often passive (Guy Crouchback was in Sword of Honor). But one suspects the Western reader may be encountering something more remarkable here--that phenomenon the Japanese call hikikomori, the disposition to turn in and drop out so much remarked upon among young Japanese, particularly men. Toro Okada, the protagonist here, may not be quite a typical case: at 30 he perhaps a bit too old. But there's something eerie about his capacity to stay disconnected, and perhaps equally eerie about the capacity of those around him to treat his passivity as unremarkable.

Two other "themes"--if you cvan call that--provide a bit more specific intereset. One is Toro's brother-in-law, the villain of the piece, a rising young politician. From the brother-in-law, we do get a plausible sniff of the aroma of avarive and corruption thst seems to have formed so durable a part of Japanese political life.

The other is easier to describe, if harder to integrate. Among many other stories, Murukami gives us a string of anecdotes from the ugly years in and around World War II, and in particular, the dreadful campaign of the Japanese to plant a "new nation" of sorts in Mancuria, north China. Although it is never made clear just what they are doing here, Murukami offer some of his most powerful and persuasive material in these accounts related to the Manchurian campaign.

A final curiosity: I've read a number of reviews of Wind-up Bird (which was first published in the United States in 1998). Most of them seem impelled to speak highly of it, to give it high marks. Yet on close reading, one gets the sense that most of the readers didn't like it very much. Is this some kind of reviewer trade code--say what you want about a "famous and important" book, as long as you give it high marks at the end?