Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries)

by Matthew Strecher

Paperback, 96 pages

English language

Published Jan. 7, 2002 by Continuum International Publishing Group.

ISBN:: 978-0-8264-5239-9

View on OpenLibrary

(22 reviews)

1 edition

altlovesbooks reviewed Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Matthew Strecher

Review of "Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Brief 2/26/23 update: I just finished re-reading this with a group of friends, and I think half my pleasure during this re-read was experiencing their reactions on reading this book. We're kind of a mix of people who have read Murakami and people who made this their first, and it was fun experiencing the same weird emotions I had the first time reading it through them.

My review below hasn't changed, this is still one of my favorite Murakami books so far, but I recognize this is a tough book for someone new to Murakami to get into. That said, there's a lot of great imagery and themes going on, and I loved re-reading this, knowing what I know now.

Original Review:
"A well without water. A bird that can't fly. An alley with no exit."

There's a lot to unpack in this novel. At its core it seems (to me) about the main character's coping with a stagnant, meaningless life. His house is on an alley with no exits. Murakami takes great care in describing his perfectly mundane house and life, his aimless, jobless wandering, and his passionless, emotionless exchanges with his wife Kumiko. A phonecall intruded on all of that, starting Toru on his wild and unexpected journey, where the end result is time begins moving for him again.

There's a lot more to it than that, and the pleasure in reading Murakami is in those details. Sure, if this is your first Murakami book, things seem haphazard, random, and meaningless when thought of individually, but this is one of those books where you put the book down and suddenly find it makes a strange bit of sense. Even as I'm writing this, things that initially didn't seem to fit together at first suddenly make more sense when considered all together.

I guess the tl;dr of this review is, what a weird, wild trip that I'm glad I went on. Murakami is an author that either you click with, or you don't. And if he clicks for you, it really, really clicks.

Siddhartha Golu reviewed Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Matthew Strecher

Review of "Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

You can always count on Murakami to provide a magical escape - to a place full of absurdities where you can't always tell apart the boundaries between dreams and reality. One of his better works.

Baltipink reviewed Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Matthew Strecher

Review of "Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I can't remember the last time I got this sucked into a book. Magical historical Zen fiction.

markgalassi reviewed Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Matthew Strecher

Review of "Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

As I read this book it rapidly became one of my handful of favorite novels.

The book is sometimes labeled as an example of "magical realism". Among other things, this label implies that the plot summaries (like the one on the book cover, and the one here on goodreads) will seem weird and not convey how wonderful the book is.

What struck me was the placid storytelling with which the narrator creates very intricate situations and yet remains completely calm. I am not sure what specific devices the write users to achieve this effect (on me, at least), but it worked very well and I was enthralled by the story.

Mark Anderson reviewed Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Matthew Strecher

Review of "Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Like a Japanese hybrid of Dostoevsky, Conrad, and Pynchon, Murakami spins one trippy tale, with a backbone of good vs. evil in the midst of the psychic horrors (and whores) of modern existence. It speaks to the power of his writing (and the skill of the translator) that I didn't even think to wonder if this book was a translation until halfway through. I will seek out more Murakami to read.