Lieutenant Mamiya: Lieutenant Tokutaro Mamiya was an officer in the Kwantung Army during the Japanese occupation of Manchukuo. He meets Toru while carrying out the particulars of Mr. Honda's will. (Honda had been a Corporal, therefore Mamiya had been his superior.) He has been emotionally scarred by witnessing the flaying of a superior officer and several nights spent in a dried-up well. He tells Toru his story both in person and in letters. The beginning of the story is very straightforward and instantly creates this weird vibe. This dude, Toru, loses his cat so he goes out to look for it. He likes spaghetti and lemon drops. He gets these strange calls at home. He finds an old abandoned house with a well. His wife is kind of like whatever. He doesn't have a job. So, you know, I'm putting all that together in my mind as I'm reading it, right? Pretty simple. This is a book about an unemployed guy searching for his cat while getting weird phone calls, making spaghetti, and getting advice from his wife on how to find the cat. Sounds like an awesome way to spend the next two weeks of my life.

Okada goes with May to work, and as part of their jobs, they survey men in Tokyo and label them according to their degree of baldness. They end up discussing how balding is so frightening because it is as if life itself is being worn away. Later no one could remember having seen her, and because it was impossible to understand how Dusty Springfield would have been playing at my club, no one believed me. But I saw her. Completing our Murakami bingo square is the book’s traditional antihero. Toru is the star of the show, married, yet strangely alone, and often seen by himself at home, with his wife only making fleeting appearances before disappearing. The writer emphasises his ordinary, everyman nature from the start:What I took from the book is this, it is a story of a man trying to avoid a blanket of sterility descending on his life. This blanket is perhaps personified as the call of the Wind Up Bird, which may stop winding the spiritual device which runs a life. During the course of the story he is presented with characters that have succumb to this blanket. They are each a warning to him, a stark reminder that he has to return elements of his life as they were for things to run smoothly again. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Summary – eNotes.com". eNotes. Archived from the original on April 26, 2018 . Retrieved April 25, 2018. Or as Paul jokingly suggested, there might even be a musical in there somewhere. (For someone else, maybe even Murakami, to create.)

The central story concerns one Toru Okada, a gofer at a Tokyo law firm who has recently quit his job. Toru leaves his house one day to look for his missing cat and suddenly finds himself thrown into a series of bizarre adventures. Not long after the cat Several characters experience this sense of there being something inside, a presence they’re usually unaware of, and when it reveals itself, it can destroy the life they’d been living up to that point. Toru eventually manages to find his own well, his own door to this other place, and it proves to be a dangerous experience, even if it’s all (literally) in his head. If I were to use only one word to describe this book, I would type the word 'brilliant' a million times with each letter in CAPITALS and fill up the entire word length of this particular space.Also Creta only began to feel emotion and pleasure when she was past her teens. If she is a mirror of Kumiko then maybe this is because Kumiko met Toru when she was around the same age? As we find out Creta is pregnant does this mean that Kumiko is also pregnant? Are the two facets of the true Kumiko? and part of 17; and Book 3 Chapter 26). [9] Combining the original three-volumes (Japanese) would have been too long, and so the publisher requested that ~25,000 words be cut for the English translation, even though Rubin had presented them a complete translation along with the requested abridged version. [10]

The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you're supposed to go up and down when you're supposed to go down. When you're supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you're supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there's no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness. A surface-level summary of this novel: a young, unemployed Tokyo man named Toru Okada is asked by his wife Kumiko to search for their missing cat. His search brings him into the orbit of several new and unusual people: a mysterious woman who calls Toru from time to time insisting that he knows her and that she’ll only be free when he remembers her name; May Kasahara, a cheerful yet morbid teenager; Malta Kano, a psychic, and her younger sister, Creta Kano, who styles herself a “prostitute of the mind”; Lieutenant Mamiya, a veteran forever changed by his experiences during the Japanese WWII campaign in Manchuria; a mother and son who call themselves Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka. Chapter 17 is not completely removed, instead the excerpt where Toru takes passport photos is removed and the very lengthy conversation Toru has with his uncle about buying real estate is condensed into one English paragraph. [9] Toru Okada is thirty years old and leads an ordinary life with his wife Kumiko. However, a strange phone call marks the beginning of a series of unusual events that entirely change the existence of the young protagonist. Everyday life and the ordinary meet with the inexplicable. The plot loses importance, fogged by dense clouds of mystery, from which only the bizarre characters of Haruki Murakami emerge. We are in a dream, we perceive it as readers and the protagonist of the novel perceives it too: «I listened to the evening news on the radio for the first time in ages, but nothing special had been happening in the world. Some teenagers had been killed in an accident on the expressway when the driver of their car had failed in his attempt to pass another car and crashed into a wall. The branch manager and staff of a major bank were under police investigation in connection with an illegal loan they had made. A thirty-six-year-old housewife from Machida had been beaten to death with a hammer by a young man on the street. But these were all events from some other, distant world. The only thing happening in my world was the rain falling in the yard.»The dream state of Toru Okada will remind many readers the surrealism of David Lynch, the American director who loves to communicate through his films with scenes that disturb for their visual impact, rather than for the linearity of well understandable plots. Alienation: Throughout the novel the characters are obviously related to each other but they never feel like they connect to one another. All of the characters develop independently and tend to live solitary lifestyles. This can be presented in Toru and Kumiko's marriage. Throughout the novel, Toru presents himself to be one who seeks solitude. One example is presented as he completes an everyday task, "I went to the Municipal pool for a swim. Mornings were the best, to avoid the crowds". [7] His desire for solitude also is shown when he quits his job to take care of the house alone while Kumiko goes to work. He enjoys being home alone. In the relationship between Kumiko and Toru, both characters seem to be developing in solitude. Both characters hide many of their thoughts from one another and even though they are married Toru ponders on the fact that he may not know much about his wife. [8]David Mathew: On The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – infinity plus non-fiction". Infinity Plus. Archived from the original on May 14, 2018 . Retrieved April 25, 2018. Piccola nota a margine: con questo romanzo Murakami ha vinto il premio letterario giapponese Yomiuri, conferitogli dal premio nobel Kenzaburō Ōe, uno dei suoi più accaniti critici precedenti. Sò soddisfazioni.