2025-09-04 - The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami Haruki ========================================================== A friend gave me a copy of this book and told me they liked the author. It's a thick book, so i didn't read it right away. This book has erotic, horror, and shamanic elements. Above all else i would classify it as a psychological novel. I perceive Toru Okada's struggle with his sense of self worth. He is obviously intelligent and capable, but he goes through a long period of abandonment and unemployment. Over time he seems to grow a sense of his intrinsic value, as opposed to his utility value. Several different characters experienced a narrow miss with death. I wouldn't call them full-blown NDE's. Their responses had several things in common. They became de-sensitized and no longer felt pain, a sense of purpose, etc. This seemed like traumatic dissociation to me. These characters became abnormal. Toru Okada is a magnet for the abnormal. His high tolerance and non-judgment make him unguarded and vulnerable to all kinds of nonsense. But these abnormalities bear gifts that enable the characters to rise above normal circumstances and achieve the unexplainable. This book talks about facts that are not true, and truths that are not facts. It talks about different kinds of time. It routinely bridges reality, dream sequences, shamanic visions, and extreme circumstances that forcibly remove people from their everyday existence, sometimes giving a tantalizing hint of satori. I detected many tropes from Japanese anime. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the tropes originate in Japanese mythology. For example, Toru Okada is cursed with a dark mark that gives him new powers, but also exacts a personal cost. This is similar to what happens to Ashitaka in Princess Mononoke. This book, like many anime series, has a rushed ending where many of the loose threads are tied up into a neat and tidy resolution. It ends on a hopeful yet melancholy note. From a GoodReads review: > While there is a heavy reliance on tropes we are all familiar > with--the unremarkable hero, the good/bad woman, the use of magic > and the surreal--these all become surprisingly fresh in Murakami's > hands. What follows excerpts from the book that i found interesting. Book 1, Chapter 4 ----------------- This was very different from the image of home I had imagined vaguely for myself before marriage. But this was /the home I had chosen./ I had a home, of course, when I was a child. But it was not one I had chosen for myself. I had been born into it, presented with it as an established fact. Now, however, I lived in a world that I had chosen through an act of will. It was my home. It might not be perfect, but the fundamental stance I adopted to my home was to accept it, problems and all, because it was something I myself had chosen. If it had problems, these were almost certainly problems that had originated within me. [commitment] Book 1, Chapter 6 ----------------- I rarely suffer lengthy emotional distress from contact with other people. A person may anger or annoy me, but not for long. I can distinguish between myself and another as beings of two different realms. It's a kind of talent (by which I do not mean to boast: it's not an easy thing to do, so if you can do it, it is a kind of talent--a special power). When someone gets on my nerves, the first thing I do is transfer the object of my unpleasant feelings to another domain, one having no connection with me. Then I tell myself, Fine, I'm feeling bad, but I've put the source of these feelings into another zone, away from here, where I can examine it and deal with it later in my own time. In other words, I put a freeze on my emotions. Later, when I thaw them out to perform the examination, I do occasionally find my emotions still in a distressed state, but that is rare. The passage of time will usually extract the venom from most things and render them harmless. Then, sooner or later, I forget about them. In the course of my life so far, I've been able to keep my world in a relatively stable state by avoiding most useless troubles through activation of this emotional management system. That I have succeeded in maintaining such an effective system all this time is a matter of some pride to me. [personal responsibility] When it came to Noboru Wataya, though, my system refused to function. I was unable simply to shove Noboru Wataya into a domain having no connection with me. And that fact itself annoyed the hell out of me. Kumiko's father was an arrogant, unpleasant man, to be sure, but finally he was a small-minded character who lived by clinging to a simple set of narrow beliefs. I could forget about someone like that. But not Noboru Wataya. He knew what kind of a man he was. And he had a pretty good idea of what made me tick as well. If he had felt like it, he could have crushed me until there was nothing left. The only reason he hadn't was that he didn't give a damn about me. I wasn't worth the time and energy it would have taken to crush me. And that's what got me about him. He was a despicable human being, an egoist with nothing inside him. But he was a far more capable individual than I was. Book 3, Chapter 1 ----------------- Between the end of that strange summer and the approach of winter, my life went on without change. Each day would dawn without incident and end as it had begun. It rained a lot in September. October had several warm, sweaty days. Aside from the weather, there was hardly anything to distinguish one day from the next. I worked at concentrating my attention on the real and useful. I would go to the pool almost every day for a long swim, take walks, make myself three meals. [plateau: internal development during external stasis] But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. ... I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning. Book 3, Chapter 20 ------------------ "Designing clothes was my secret little door to a different world," said Nutmeg, "a world that belonged only to me. In that world, imagination was everything. The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality. And what I really liked about it was that it was free. It didn't cost a thing. It was wonderful! Imagining beautiful clothes in my mind and transferring the images to paper was not just a way for me to leave reality behind and steep myself in dreams, though. I needed it to go on living. It was natural and obvious to me as breathing. So I assumed that everyone else was doing it too. When I realized that everyone else was /not/ doing it--that they couldn't do it even if they tried--I told myself, `I'm different from other people, so the life I live will have to be different from theirs.'" [individuality, each person having their own unique calling, talents, and relationship with life, the universe, and everything.] author: Murakami, Haruki, 1949- detail: LOC: PL856.U673 N4513 tags: book,fantasy,fiction title: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Tags ==== book fantasy fiction