Bergsonian Critique

It has been almost three months since I finished Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”, a modern tale of magical realism that echoes a comparable stupefaction to “Alice in the Wonderland”. Though, unlike Lewis Carroll‘s masterpiece, Chronicle evokes both delightful musings of an ordinary man and sometimes a grotesque depiction of a sympathetic nature of Japan’s involvement during World War II. What started as a mundane detective tale becomes something far extraordinary, but Murakami is by no means a sensationalist in his writing, rather a tranquil surrealist who lets his readers to freely wonder in his imagination. While the book is relatively fragmented, the chaos that engulfs Murakami’s work is orderly and constructed, and even though it leaves too many unanswered questions to ponder, Chronicle manages to linger a sense of completion and satisfaction behind.

Within the sparse and gently written translation of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a complex story with idiosyncratic yet convincible characters lay abound. The protagonist is a very ordinary man named Toru Okada, a passive, affectless individual with a lowly job and even lower expectations. Though currently jobless and living on the expanses of his working wife, a magazine editor named Kumiko, he seemingly enjoys his ordinary, day-to-day routines. Of course, even Murakami couldn’t construct an absorbing account through Okada’s dinner preparations, dry-cleaning trips, and book readings. Inevitable, following the same trend that exists in his other writings, the catalyst that eventually disrupts Okada’s routinism is ordinary at first; a disappearance of Toru’s pet cat. Incidentally, not long after the cat disappears, Toru’s wife vanishes as well, which later plunges him onto a contemplative journey of self-worth, personal desires, facial abnormalities, and most importantly, dreams manifestation.

Indeed, as Toru’s dreams become more garish, the lines between the dream world and reality become increasingly blurred. The narrative becomes intersected with accounts from the past that always seem to have an outstanding resemblance to Toru’s own circumstances. Lieutenant Mamiya, a prisoner of the Mongolians during the Second World War, recalls the hardships he suffered and the massacre he witnessed, and Nutmeg Akasaka tells the story of her father, a veteran of the same war who, despite remaining a free man, and through no choice of his own, also participated in the torture and violent killings of Chinese prisoners.

It is really quite a triumph of Murakami’s to turn such a bizarre chain of events into a plausible, though surreal, story. With such a merged storytelling involving so many characters, it would be all too easy to lose focus, and whilst this may happen at times, for the most part the novel is very carefully constructed. Murakami cleverly ties together all the obscure details, leaving few gaps in the text, and when he does, is often deliberate. The storyline doesn’t falter, and it is generally easy to remember the identity and significance of all of the main characters, which is not only handy for the reader when battling with a book that’s in excess of 600 pages in length, but also a sign of Murakami’s skill in keeping organized a story that can at times seem anything but.

While my description of an organized chaos might indicate that the story is very well planned out (which it is), it is clear that Murakami averts his novel from being treaded down a path he has already created for it; he sporadically meanders off it in an altogether different direction before returning to carry on where he left off. The overlying of Toru’s dreams and reality and the other characters’ frequent expeditions into the past add to Murakami’s portrayal of the world as fragmented and chaotic, yet the transitions between them are seamless and it is a testament to the author’s wonderful storytelling that he pulls it off so well.

The patches of history that Murakami weaves into the text are particularly effective at making his adult fairy-tale convincing. He writes them in great detail and seems to revel in drawn-out descriptions of the acts of torture witnessed by the characters; he describes the screams of a man being skinned alive, the process of killing a man with a bayonet (stick it in, twist it, then draw upwards towards the heart), and the clubbing to death of a man with a baseball bat. Instead of it just being a story about Toru Okada, there are now albeit small insights into a part of Japan’s past history that it often desirable to keep them away from public attention, and their connections with events in the main body of the story make them all more pertinent, as well as raising age-old questions about whether history really does repeat itself. With elements of psychology and philosophy also are added into this literary mix, raising questions about dreams, reality, and what it means to be alive makes Chronicle much more than a mere fantastical tale.