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The Songs of Mechanical Birds
Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle."
By Steven Robert Allen
DECEMBER 8, 1997:
Toru Okada quit his errand-boy job at a law firm. For the moment,
he shops, cooks and cleans, while his wife Kumiko works as an
editor at a health food magazine. He reads a book from the library.
He plans what he should cook for dinner. He meticulously irons
his shirts, an activity that helps him relax.
Quickly, though, this mundane existence is perverted by unforeseen
events. Toru begins receiving unrequested phone sex calls from
an anonymous woman who insists she knows him. He befriends a 16-year-old,
death-obsessed girl who conducts research for a toupee manufacturer.
Two sisters, who run a "clairvoyance service," contact
him, ostensibly to help him locate his wife's missing cat. Instead
of finding the cat, though, they take samples of his bath water
and tell him that his brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya, a powerful
politician and "intellectual," brutally raped one of
them.
Then one day Kumiko doesn't come home from work, and Toru is suddenly
drawn into the sticky web of his powerful brother-in-law. The
book becomes a kind of magic mushroom mystery novel: Why has his
wife left? What does his brother-in-law have to do with it? How
did he get this strange blue mark on his cheek, which seems to
give him psychic powers? Why does everyone he knows have some
connection with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria before World
War II?
Those familiar with 20th century Japanese literature will notice
that this kind of plotting is not exactly standard fare. In Japan,
Haruki Murakami is considered to be the leading exponent of a
new wave of young writers: cynical, weird, piercingly mo-dern,
searingly in-tense. His fiction reads in sharp contrast to the
Japanese writers of the recent past who have tended to focus on
the traditional aspects of Japanese society and the way they are
being swallowed up by encroaching modernity and influence from
the West. In Murakami's work, that Japan has vanished,
replaced by a society dominated by computers, urban decay, sex
and mass media.
In this society, technology and media have become sinister forces
aligned against the best interests of humanity. Noboru Wataya,
Toru's brother-in-law, is Murakami's version of the Information
Age. He is manipulative, inflammatory, superficial, utterly lacking
in integrity and incredibly adept at delivering the kind of performances
required to thrive on mass media. Toru, on the other hand, to
everyone's astonishment and irritation, does not even own a television.
Kumiko falls into the slim wrinkle separating these two worlds:
the dark world of lies, half-truths, sickness and image, and the
light world of truth, health and integrity.
Toru is not a genius, but he comprehends the difference, in a
spiritual and political sense, between what should be valued and
what should be undermined. Information, we often forget, is not
the same as knowledge. Nor is it the same as truth. Paradoxically,
the introduction of new media, such as TV and the World Wide Web,
has not necessarily allowed us to understand our world better.
In many ways it has simply led
to heightened confusion and
paranoia.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle portrays a society and an in-
dividual life that are disintegrating largely because of these
factors. Thankfully, there is nothing heavy-handed about Murakami's
social commentary. Societal problems and personal ones fester,
convincingly, like a single infected wound. Murakami's Tokyo is
saturated with commercialism and media. In fact, the city is so
isolated from truth and reality that even the birds sound mechanical.
Nothing is quite what it seems. Toru Okada, the tiny everyman,
sorts and organizes the events, personalities and stories that
swirl around him. Moderately bright, yet far from brilliant, how
can he make sense of a world such as this?
Knots of tension are tied and loosened in rapid succession. In
the final third of the book, the reader becomes apprehensive that
Murakami will lose control over his narrative. The novel seems
destined to degenerate into empty surrealism, or worse, allegory.
Murakami, though, knows what he's doing. By the last page, every
piece has fallen into place in a way that is surprising and twisted,
but at the same time aesthetically satisfying.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a major work that deserves
the attention that it will inevitably receive. It succeeds because
it tells a story about real people, keeps the reader gripping
the rail with white knuckles and reveals glimpses of our evolving
world, which we desperately need to see. (Knopf, cloth, $25.95)
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