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| The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel | 
| Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy Used: $5.49
You Save: $10.46 (66%)
New (43) from $9.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  285 reviews
Sales Rank: 2762
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st Vintage International Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 624
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 0679775439
Dewey Decimal Number: 895.635
EAN: 9780679775430
ASIN: 0679775439
Publication Date: September 1, 1998
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Weird but engaging September 4, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Toru Okada, the protagonist, loses his job, his cat, and his wife and goes looking for all three. His search introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters. Strange occurances abound. In the end, this book has too many loose ends (perhaps because the English translation is abridged) and wanders into the weird too often. I do, however, continue to think about the book after finishing it.
 If you leave out the sex August 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
there's not much of the book left.
We have telephone sex; adulterous sex; occultish-astral sex; sex with prostitutes and ex-prostitutes; vaguely-titled "fitted" sex for exclusive clients; sex with a device (vibrator?), wet-dreams, rape fantasies...
Just about everything except sex between a man and a woman bonded by love and committed to one another in anything as outlandish as marriage.
Another oddity amongst all of this prurience is the fact that most of it is related second-handedly (to the main character, Toru). The actual, 1st person sexual encounters are comparatively few, and related elliptically. Whether this is intentional or not is hard to determine, for one is wary to credit the author with anything resembling an old fashioned literary device when the post-modernist attachment to ambiguity is so evident.
Second-handed accounts and hearsay abound in the novel. (It ties in with Murakami's penchant for name-dropping western musicians, and their music at every possible turn. It is an effective, charming ploy used to good effect in setting the tone, but the problem is that it is used extensively in all Murakami's work I've read up to date. It eventually raises the suspicion of an unconscious, provincial fixation with Western culture. But, of course it could be justified by a fan of his writing as a deliberate ploy to reflect globalization )
In the same vein, every-one Toru meets in the novel seems to be hell-bent on revealing the most intimate and esoteric details of their lives to him. In another time this would have been noted as an unrealistic flaw, but such is the license granted to writers of the ilk that the line dividing a stroke of genius and plain sloppiness has been all but obliterated, effectively pre-empting any such criticism, it would seem.
That said, Murakami writes so that one wants to read. And to keep on reading. As has been remarked in other reviews, it may ultimately prove to be an unrewarding experience, but his writing makes for compelling reading nonetheless. He obviously enjoys writing, and it comes across. He is never laboured. There is something in his writing which redeems the obvious flaws. It has the slickness of a good a advert, so cool you like to watch it over and over(without a second thought about the product itself) Which seems to be an indispensable skill for the art of prose, competing with all else that demands our attention. In that Murakami achieves what many other serious novelists dream of: to hold the flighty, fickle modern audience spellbound, as the majority of the reviews here attest.
Eventually, though, the proof is in the eating, not the puff, of the pudding. Whether hype can transform itself into product remains to be seen. Only time will tell. I, for one, have left the table with the suspicion that once the sugar-rush wears off, the want for substance will start to nag.
 Quite the story, you just can't walk away from it. August 24, 2008
I just finished reading The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, I stayed up too late several nights in a row because I couldn't put it down. Sometimes scary and haunting but altogether very beautifully written and very true to the human situation.
 B- August 7, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Interminably long, bloated, and meandering, but there are moments of beautiful writing and some worthy chapters that can stand alone (e.g., Lt. Mamiya's stories). Overall, however, the characters, themes, plot just don't come together for me; none of these feel fully realized, urgent, or deserving of the demands it makes on the reader. I feel that the book could have been improved by some judicious editing.
His writing style IS "hypnotic", as they say. Toru's voice really took me to that grey zone between reality and the otherworld that he experiences. Sometimes when I put the book down, I felt like I had just emerged from the dark, mysterious world of "Room 208", and I needed to take a moment to remind myself that I was in the real world.
Murakami is clearly a talented writer, but ultimately his ambitions got the best of him with this one and he doesn't deliver a "masterpiece"; he delivers a promising but flawed book.
Amazing novel by one of our greatest story tellers August 6, 2008
This is one of the finest works by Murakami whose style is unsurpassed in modern literature.
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