The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, 2-18.10 (Sunniva)

Now, let me first say how sorry I am that this review comes this late. Due to circumstances, mostly my work with Global Dignity Day, I was far too busy to read outside of breakfast time and bed time, and I quickly realised I couldn’t read this book before bedtime. It was simply too creepy, right out stomach turning (these passages often showed up at my breakfast readings) and surreal for my easily influenced mind to ingest before sleep.

Then, the night I was going to finish the book and write and post the review, three days after the original posting date, I was also busy registering online with a new agency that will give me temporary jobs as a kindergarden assistant (long story) and drinking tea and getting ready before a Norwegian Friday night tv show (Nytt på Nytt), when I spilled tea all over my laptop and it started failing almost immediately. And believe me, I cried. As in tears.  My six-year-old Macbook Pro is just about everything to me, I hardly think I knew how much before it broke down. This following week has been spent trying to hand it in to the local Apple Store for a repair job, going back and forth with demands of a six-year-old-receipt, then being told I had to go home and do the back-up myself, or they could do it for a small £200 fee. What with seeing different people (also having a brilliant halibut dinner with Christine, I’m not complaining about my free time), working in kindergardens and going to the Red Cross Youth Autumn Camp this weekend, I never found the time to sit and write this.

SLIGHT SPOILERS FROM NOW ON
This is already far too long. What I want to say about the book is: I really, really wanted to like it. I was prepared to enjoy it, which was probably what went wrong. I have read a lot of Murakami in the past, from 2009 till 2011 I was reading him quite often, until I needed a break. I realised that there were two books I couldn’t tell apart. They both (as far as I can remember) feature young, single middleclass Japanese men who drink a lot of whiskey and talk with strange women and go into slightly surreal worlds next to this one where you’re never certain whether it’s a dream or the truth or an allegory. Does that sound familiar?

I still like, and want to like, Murakami. I am longing to read Sputnik Sweetheart, and to reread After Dark. I just didn’t think this was one of his best books. It was all right. I loved it in the beginning. The strangest thing is that it went downhill after Kumiko left. There is one point, a while later, probably page 307 or 393 or something like that (I don’t have my copy right now), where May Kasahara says something, and it feels very final, and the book could just as easily, or maybe even better, have ended there for my part.

There are too many threads that are not gathered. I’m a little confused in the end. Also, how did amazing and slightly weird (and therefore more amazing) May Kasahara turn into this sweet little girl who feeds bread to the ducks and wants to share a pocket in the cold weather? Even though I didn’t understand her reasoning earlier in the book, I preferred her as the girl who would test how long she could keep Toru Okada in the well without saving him. As much as she makes the point about the girls in the village only wanting to get married and stop working, Murakami seems to imply that she is happy with everything now that she has found the job in the wig factory. I just don’t believe it.

All right: I still enjoyed reading the book. I liked the different sections. I’m a little bit in love with Cinnamon in a sort of young boy – pat on the head- sort of way.

This will be too long if I mention all the small, big, simple and complex thoughts I had about this book. I wondered how the war stories fit in. I didn’t think they did. They were interesting, but they were certainly from a different book. I wondered about the different Japanese customs and practices that I don’t get, and I wonder whether Toru and Kumiko are slightly upper middle class (yet he says they couldn’t afford a house) when they keep dropping stuff off at the dry cleaner’s, or whether I am just from a country where only fairly rich people would make a habit of getting their clothes dry cleaned. Probably the last one.

My thoughts are a little muddled by now, and by not having the book here with me. Maybe I'll comment more later on?