The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I am vaguely new to listening to audiobooks and just reading in general so my thoughts are not backed by much experience but from the few books that I have listened to and read in the past, this is by fast the best.

The narrators voice is incredibly soothing and calm while pronouncing every word with impeccable accuracy this makes the experiencing much easier when compared to some other narrators whose voice you have to pay an extreme amount of attention to so that you can understand the words being read.

The story is amazing and creates such a beautiful and clear view in the listeners mind as to what the world surrounding our characters is like. It's the kind of descriptions that takes a location and turns it into a character.

This book is simply incredble. The story, the characters, the beautifully described locations from 'enveloping moonlight' to the wonderful 'sand dunes' alongside freezing cold blue rivers the locations never disapoint to take you out of this often bland world and envelop you in Murakami's world, 'a world where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning.' I don't how I would like to draw this review to an end so I'll just reiterate the point that this book is incredible and if you are reading this to discover whether it is worth your time and energy. It is.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone.

I am vaguely new to listening to audiobooks and just reading in general so my thoughts are not backed by much experience but from the few books that I have listened to and read in the past, this is by fast the best.

The narrators voice is incredibly soothing and calm while pronouncing every word with impeccable accuracy this makes the experiencing much easier when compared to some other narrators whose voice you have to pay an extreme amount of attention to so that you can understand the words being read.

The story is amazing and creates such a beautiful and clear view in the listeners mind as to what the world surrounding our characters is like. It's the kind of descriptions that takes a location and turns it into a character.

This book is simply incredible. The story, the characters, the beautifully described locations from 'enveloping moonlight' to the wonderful 'sand dunes' alongside freezing cold blue rivers the locations never disappoint to take you out of this often bland world and envelop you in Murakami's world, 'a world where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning.' I don't how I would like to draw this review to an end so I'll just reiterate the point that this book is incredible and if you are reading this to discover whether it is worth your time and energy. It is.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone.

I enjoyed parts of this book (especially the story around Lieutenant Mamiya, Cinnamons character) but fail to see, how many of the other parts of this story are tied together (Malta and Creta Kanos existence, the meaning of Torus exchanges with May Kasahara.

Many of the motifs encountered in this book (the world that can only be entered from the bottom of the well, the work that Nutmeg and him are doing, the blue mark) might somehow connect to japanese folklore, but to me they are "a riddle I still have to solve".

The call of the windup bird seems to me to indicate the loss of free will and destiny taking over. Sometimes the call of the windup bird coincides with horrible events, such as the killing of the soldiers disguised in baseball clothing. But in other parts the windup bird calls out at seemingly random points in the story with no apparent reason of special meaning.

Because some of these things bugged me more than they should, I read up on the translation history, and it seems that some of my irks with this story could be due to the parts left out during the initial english translation (as the german translation I read was based on this one).

[careful, minor rant on edits during translation ahead]

It seems like the major turning point for Toru's character, when he starts to take charge of his situation, was left out, because it was tied to the story of Creta asking him to leave Japan with her:

> I cannot run away, and should not run away. That was the conclusion I reached. No
> matter where I might go, that would always chase me down. No matter how far.

This also explains why the existence of the Kano sisters was not clear to me at first. Creta Kano originally held a much more prominent role but was demoted to a minor characters, because the translator thought "the clairvoyant Kanō sisters detract from the book".

What I conclude from this experience is that for future books that are translated, I need to research first, how closely those translations follow the original. I'm not saying that translators in general are wrong when they take some freedom in the translation, but it definitively detracted from my experience of this book.

Especially when editors/translators cut or rearrange the book, because of some bs marketing reason ("we cannot sell something that exceeds some arbitrary length"), this almost always cripples the story in some way. Do what you are told to (publish the book or not) and please leave the content of what you are publishing up to the original author.

You know that old trick magicians do when they remove a tablecloth without breaking anything? Well something similar happens when you start a Murakami book, the book is the table, you are the items on the table and the tablecloth is reality. After a few pages reality gets pulled from under you and you find yourself in some crazy world that makes no sense but is mesmerising at the same time.

This story is in 3 parts. Parts 1 and 2 are brilliant, what you would expect from Murakami. Weird women, ears, random animal (Jelly fish), a cat, main character who is like an emotionless robot and gets phased by nothing, more weird women. These two parts are some of the best writing he has done. Part 3 though, he tries something new and I don't like something new! He includes letters, news stories and articles from a magazine, whilst these were interesting and well written they do break up the flow of the magical story.

There is something unique with his writing that no other author I've come across can do, if he is writing about a woman's body with only a few words he can make her seem incredibly sexy....even if she does have a cats tail, up until that point she was very ordinary sounding. And when he writes a torture scene it is more gruesome and shocking than anything from American Psycho, he doesn't go into too much detail but still you're left shocked.

Fantastic book, unfortunately the damage done to the flow in book 3 knocks it down to 4 stars.

Confieso que soy extremadamente imparcial con Murakami, me gusta, me gusta mucho. Me engancha tanto su mundo que no quiero dejarlo, no me permito estar en otro 'estado', quiero vivir en ese mundo donde nada pasa pero todo parece cambiar inevitablemente. Quiero dejarme ir, olvidarme de la vida 'real' y vivir la 'absurda realidad' que nos ofrece. La alienación social de sus protagonistas alimenta esa peligrosa misantropía en la que todes nos vemos abocades y me encanta dejarme llevar por esa sensación.

En esta novela más que en cualquier otra de este autor veo que para mi Murakami es un 'Kafka aplicado'. Esa fina barrera que divide lo real de la fantástico pero con una diferencia: Murakami parece querer dar explicación a aquello que Kafka ofrece sin titubear: el 'absurdo'. Lo que me magnetiza del escritor japonés es esa esperanza de que todo va a tener sentido, ese jugar con nuestro raciocinio y en definitiva, poner en juego al determinismo, hacernos dudar del realismo. Para un escéptico como yo es una constante lucha entre convicciones y dudas que disfruto enormemente pongan contra las cuerdas.

De mis novelas favoritas de este escritor.

A wild ride. Mysteries piled upon mysteries, but without the luxury of having any of them explained to you at the end. Reportedly, the English translation was heavily abridged - the original was published in three volumes. On one hand, the full text might have made more sense. But on the other hand, I barely managed to finish the book as it is.

Toru, the protagonist, is a cipher. A passive, passionless man who drifts through life, doing nothing of his own volition. (In the real world, anyway. In an alternate reality somewhere in his own mind he manages to have an affair and to kill a man.) He has no stories of his own, but absorbs the stories of those that he meets. And boy, are they doozies. Spies getting flayed alive in WWII in Manchuria, surviving (or not) the Siberian gulag.

I listened to an audio version, where the speaker did different voices for each character. And God did I hate the one he used for May Kasahara. All brassy Valley Girl. I winced when she had dialog. Or worse, when she wrote an entire letter.