The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

I finished reading this book on Friday. It is a really good book. Really REALLY good.

The plot is long, twisted, convoluted and fantastic. Here is a brief description. The main character, and our narrator, Toru Okada recently quits his job and loses his cat (these 2 events are not related). Then he befriends a 16 year old girl and his wife leaves him (these 2 events are not also not related.) He then meets 2 psychic sisters and gets a visit from an old friend of another psychic, who used to be a solider (these 2 events are too, not related). Then there is the intense, dislikeable brother-in-law, dry wells, tennis shoes, people skinned alive, shooting tigers in zoos, submarines, wig making factories, baseball bats, jellyfish, Cutty Sark, motorbike accidents, prostitutes, water, the wind-up bird... plus more psychic fashion designers, prisoners of war, traitors, bluish marks, darkness, secret missions, red vinyl hats... (and none of these thing are related, or perhaps all these events ARE all related...).

Murakami writes this labyrinth tale very much like a hard boil detective novel. The everyman stating everything as a matter of fact with mysterious people coming and go telling foreboding tales, twist and turns and shady pasts, and things that just "happen". Murakami goes from the mundane, such as cooking spaghetti to fantasy, where men have no faces and fresh scalps hang from the roof, and also blurs the line between them, such as grotesque torture scene and the executions. It's many greats stories, linked with many disparate real, unreal characters all inhabiting this real, unreal world created by Murakami. Just thinking about the setting of the book (suburban Tokyo, factory in the mountains, Mongolian desert, Siberian concentration camp, Manchuria, Malta... and alongside these "real" places, there are also dreamt hotels, bars and restaurants...) is enough to confuse. Some of the characters say they are frustrated with their own inability to convey what they mean, what they really want to say. That is exactly how I feel when describing this book. All the images, characters, stories just balance on top of your head, not in any logical order, but somehow, mysteriously connected.

I knew about two thirds into this book, it'd wouldn't understand it fully, and would have to re-read it again to fully appreciate it. I don't mind. In fact I'll relish it. A young girl ponders, why is it when you put rice pudding mix into the microwave rice pudding comes out? Why is it never macaroni cheese? That is what reading this books is like. It feels like Murakami has put in one thing, and I've come out with something totally unfamiliar. It is daunting, complex, simple and wonderful.