The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The two other works by Murakami that I am familiar with have been more real-to-life, and captivating in their storytelling. This one contrasts with Norwegian Wood and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki in being completely supernatural, fully embracing magical realism as a means to get across equally perplexing ideas. I don’t read too many books filled with such magical realism but Murakami involves so much in his storytelling and the breadth is unbelievable: from domestic marital issues, all the way to a gory description of a man being skinned alive during wartime. I can say I’ve read it, but I can’t say that I’ve come to my own conclusions on an interpretation for many aspects of the book yet – and that’s probably the point.

What does it mean to know someone? The protagonist, Toru Okada, comes to face this question after getting in a couples’ spat with his wife Kumiko, over her annoyance at patterned toilet-paper. In their years of marriage, he had never known her distaste over patterned toilet-paper, and it made him think, what other parts of her did he not know? Did he really know her at all? In real life, I take it as a sign of growth when I learn something new about an acquaintance. But for close friends, family, it can feel oddly jarring at times to suddenly realize that each person had an infinite number of reactions to an infinitude of situations, that you really don’t know completely what another is like. At times the odd feeling of alienation comes from time changing people, or just random moments of nonsensical, almost existential deliberation over identity such as Toru’s, of the difference between a self and the many concealed masks it owns.