By: Haruki Murakami
I read this book last year, but enjoyed it and felt like writing about it, even though it doesn't count towards my 2006 fifty.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a strange postmodern Alice-in-wonderland type journey mixed with sexual angst and generation x passivity in a Japanese Setting. It begins when Okada's cat Noboru Wataya goes missing and his wife asks him to go find it. Okada has time to look since he quit his job at a law firm and has no motivation to find a new one.
This seemingly insignificant incident, is of course, the inciting incident that draws Okada behind the scenes of a story that begins in World War Two and has ramifications in the modern political world. All of this is connected by a supernatural dream-like world and the strange characters that move between these worlds.
Murakami pulls off an incredible feat- an epic with a passive gen-x-er at its center. More than that, he walks that fine line in creating a supernatural world without giving in too deeply to the fantasy. He shows you just enough of this world to intrigue his audience, but not enough to give any answers - much like a dream. There is something very 'twin peaks' about his world; a world in which the real and tangible are touched and influenced by the 'other', but this 'other' is too different to understand. Like 'Twin Peaks', if we understood this world any better, it wouldn't be as interesting.
