Lennon, Brian. "Foreign Dispatches/ Writing From Abroad: 'The perfect music for cooking pasta'." Review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. The Boston Book Review 4.10 (December 1997): 30.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

Is there an optimal length, calibrated for reading time and labor, of a novel? Perhaps about three hundred pages, which is manageable in a day's reading, without being an insubstantial read, either. Beyond that point, one may begin to reflect longingly on the next book on the pile, and to resent an author's demands on one's time---as if there aren't hundreds of other potentially equally "important" novels, so to speak, being published every year.

Besides which, enormous books are heavy and unwieldy: they weigh down one's shoulder bag, and are impossible to manipulate with one hand over dinner. In a 1992 interview with Jay McInerney, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami explained, "Since readers in Japan dislike thick books, what would be sold in America in one volume is divided into two volumes when sold in Japan... The reason Japanese readers dislike thick books is that they're heavy and hard to read on commuter trains." Indeed, the Kodansha English Library edition of Murakami's two million copy- (four million volume-) selling Norwegian Wood (1989) is a marvel, measuring only 4" by 6"---like the anachronistic Oxford World's Classics series, just the right size for a pocket.

And yet: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami's latest, runs well over 600 pages in Knopf's (single-volume) English edition, translated by Jay Rubin. Toru Okada, an unemployed thirty-year-old paralegal living on the outskirts of Tokyo, is cooking spaghetti for breakfast when he receives the first of a series of mysterious phone calls: from an anonymous and amorous woman; from his wife Kumiko, who requests that he go looking for their missing cat; and from a mystic named (after the island) Malta Kano, who claims that Kumiko's brother, Noboru Wataya (which is also the name of the cat) has raped Malta's sister Creta. Later, while looking for the cat, Okada meets a philosophic nymphet named May, and the two inaugurate an erotically charged friendship. The next day, he is visited by a former Japanese Army lieutenant, who tells a lengthy tale of his wartime adv[text missing]

Like Dance Dance Dance (1988), A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle opens with a gesture deeply citational and recombinative, and self-consciously Chandleresque: "When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM radio broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta." Spaghetti is a typical meal for a Murakami protagonist, and a fondness for U.S. and European music is also to be expected. A wide range of reference within Western, and particularly U.S. American literature, music and film is one distinctive trait of Murakami's fiction, much of which might perhaps as easily be set in New York or San Francisco as in Tokyo. The skeptical and abstracted loners of these novels couldn't be further from the conventional model of the social group culture of Japan; however much they may share, [text missing]

Finally, however, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle represents a departure from this entrenched (and among young readers in Japan, wildly successful) formula. Alongside the arch quest-narrative of a bemused and indecisive youngish man, there runs the historical sub-tale of the Japanese lieutenant's exploits in the war in China---a narrative that directly engages the atrocities of Nanking and the question of Japanese responsibility for human suffering on a scale equivalent to that inflicted by Nazi Germany. Grisly episodes such as the skinning of a captured Japanese by Mongolian soldiers, the execution of a Chinese insurrectionist with a baseball bat, and a massacre of zoo animals cohabit awkwardly with Okada's slacker speculation, as if Murakami, in some ways Japan's Douglas Coupland, now wants to be its Heinrich Böll as well.

As evident here as in previous work is Murakami's gift for quirky observation: "He look at me with eyes narrowed as if to apologize for being unable to speak because of the nervous black panther sleeping by his side. Which is not to say that there was a black panther sleeping by his side: he just looked as if there were"; "A chunk of cloud shaped like a fist appeared out of nowhere and hid the sun for a time." At its best, Murakami's prose bears the thoughtful levity of contented solitude, the quiet moments in which a person alone with him- or herself notices the sky, the sounds of birds or insects, what the poet Howard Nemerov called "the distracted drumming of the world's importunate plenty"---and that of the thinker's mind itself. Okada's sojourn at the bottom of the well, for example, yields some of the most quietly exuberant and delightful passages in the novel:

It felt extremely strange not to be able to see my own body with my own eyes, though I knew it must be there. Staying very still in the darkness, I became less and less convinced of the fact that I actually existed. To cope with that, I would clear my throat now and then, or run my hand over my face. That way, my ears could check on the existence of my voice, my hand could check on the existence of my face, and my face could check on the existence of my hand.... In the darkness, I pressed the fingertips of one hand against the fingertips of the other---thumb against thumb, index finger against index finger. My right-hand fingers ascertained the existence of my left-hand fingers, and the fingers of my left hand ascertained the existence of the fingers of my right hand. Then I took several slow, deep breaths. All right, enough of this thinking about the mind.

With nothing better to do, I would pick up the flashlight and shine it at random---at the ground, at the walls, at the well cover. What I found there was always the same ground, the same walls, the same well cover. The shadows cast by the moving beam would sway, stretch and shrink, swell and contract. When I tired of this, I would spend time feeling my face, probing every line and crevice, examining my features anew to learn their shape. I had never been seriously concerned about the shape of my ears before this.

On the other hand, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle does suffer, at times, an excessive neighborhoodiness---that suburban fabulism that insists on a world of wise teenagers and other wonderfully eccentric strangers, for whom small talk is utterly beyond the pale. Though this novel's good-natured surrealism and its willing play (literally) with the more fanciful elements of psychoanalytic theory are among its best elements, there are moments, as when a character describes herself as a "prostitute of the mind," when this strieks one as a novelist's untrained and clumsily self-regarding gloss on Ideas. Such pandering may discredit Murakami's latest work in the eyes of those not requiring quite so much reader-friendliness[text missing]

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