The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
(Knopf Publishing Group,
1994)
Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1965
I finally finished reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, after about a year and a half of picking it up and putting it down. I wasn't putting it down because I wasn't enjoying it. I was putting it down because sometimes the intensity of feeling I felt through it was just too much, and I needed a break. But it was well worth the effort of completion.
Murakami is one of my favourite authors. He walks the line between writing simple stories about the real world and writing otherworldly dreams of what is happening in a spiritual sphere. There is never just one dimension to his books. Every battle the protagonist goes through is a physical and spiritual one. And the ways he describes this in his novels is haunting and visceral. His books feel very Japanese to me, in the way that there's a simplicity and yet a darker spirituality, and when I read them, there is this feeling like I've entered into an Asian world.
Murakami is one of my favourite authors. He walks the line between writing simple stories about the real world and writing otherworldly dreams of what is happening in a spiritual sphere. There is never just one dimension to his books. Every battle the protagonist goes through is a physical and spiritual one. And the ways he describes this in his novels is haunting and visceral. His books feel very Japanese to me, in the way that there's a simplicity and yet a darker spirituality, and when I read them, there is this feeling like I've entered into an Asian world.
The story of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a story about physical, sexual and emotional abuse, torture and horrorific experiences, and the journey that needs to be taken to become a whole human again. It is a story of infinite characters and subtlety, with an amount of links that cannot be described in a summary. As Toru himself says at the end of the book, "All kinds of characters come onto the scene, and strange things have happened one after another, to the point where, if I try to think about them in order, I lose track. " (Pg 577)
The story begins with one man, Toru Okada, whose wife, Kumiko, unexpectedly leaves him one day. We find him at the start of the book, waiting at home for Kumiko to return. Unemployed, and at home, Toru's main profession becomes trying to understand why his wife would leave the happy simple life of love they had created together.
With so much time on his hands, Toru befriends his young female neighbour May Kasahara who he has discussions with about the deeper questions of life. Calling him "Mr. Wind-Up Bird, she compares him with the tuneless bird no one ever sees. Intwined in with starting a friendship with May, is his sudden obsession with an abandoned house that he walks past in the alley on the way to May's house, which he and May call, "The Hanging House." "The Hanging House," is a house of infinite bad luck, in which every family that has ever lived there has either been killed, or killed themselves. In the back yard of this house is a well that has gone dry years ago, that begins to draw Toru's interest.
Soon into the story, we meet another two characters- Malta Kano and her sister Creta Kano. Malta is an energy worker, who deals with solving problems on an etherial level, who approaches Toru because Kumiko has contacted her about their missing cat. The missing cat was a source of extreme distress when Kumiko was in the relationship, and it going missing seemed like a sign of everything falling apart. Malta also seems to have links to Noboru Wataya, Kumiko's brother, who is an ominous force of political power, and who has often seemed to have some kind of unnatural and grotesque hold on Kumiko. As well at this time, a military man, Ushikawa, finds Toru and begs to tell him his story of torture and horror when he was a soldier in Russia.
And then, one day, in order to calm his mind, Toru breaks into the Hanging House and climbs down the empty well to sit in the darkness. After a few hours of mediating, Toru goes to climb back up his rope ladder, only to find that May has pulled it up as some kind of twisted joke. Stuck in the well for days, Toru begins to seemingly lose his grasp on reality, and on himself. He thinks often on the story of the military man, in which the man was thrown down a well to die after watching the rest of his comrades get skinned alive. The man felt that after this experience he lost something fundamental about his soul, and could never truly be alive again.
When Creta Kano finds him and finally lets him out, Toru is never the same again. He becomes obsessed with the well and going down into the darkness, trying to pass through the wall into a spiritual realm.
That's when everything starts to dissolve the lines between physical reality and the spiritual realm. Things start happening to Toru, which feel like strange spiritual threads coming out of the woodwork. A mark appears on the right side of his face- a huge purple birthmark with no cause or understanding. Sexual phone calls from a stranger. A letter from Kumiko which seems like a lie. Extremely real dreams of sexual encounters with Creta Kano in a darkened room in an unknown realm. The cat returns. Walks through the city which feel like floating. The meeting of a strange woman named Nutmeg who seems too overly interested in him.
Soon, Nutmeg discloses to him that she too is an energy worker, whose job is to help very rich women cleanse their energetic fields. She feels he has something very special in the well, and her and Toru buy the property, building a secret compound where women can enter the well.
After many journeys into the well, Toru eventually starts to be able to pass through the wall and deal with the other side. His main point of contact is a darkened room where he can feel a female presence who is trapped there. He can also feel a dark ominous male presence which enters in and out of the room, and who Toru has to run from.
Linked all through Toru's explorations into the well, are the stories of Ushikawa, whose horror and consequent spiritual deadness talk about the human condition of pain and losing one's soul to it. As Toru goes down into the darkness again and again, he comes to understand that Kumiko is the trapped woman in the darkened room, and that she too is a lost soul that has had unspeakable horrors done to her.
In his final journey into the well, Toru knows that the evil presence is Noboru Wataya, Kumiko's brother, who has defiled and injured Kumiko, leaving her in a spiritual limbo where she cannot leave him. After finding out Kumiko's dark secret, Toru stays to finally battle the spiritual essence of Noboru Wataya. After a large struggle, Toru beats him to death with a baseball bat, and then finds himself back in the well. By killing Noboru Wataya, Toru has released the pent up flow of energy, and the well suddenly begins filling with water. Too injured to move, Toru thinks that he will finally die down in the well. He is saved however, by Cinnamon, Nutmeg's son, and brought back up to the house to recover.
Bedridden for days, Toru discovers the news that Noboru Wataya has collapsed from some unknown cause and is unconscious in a hospital. He also discovers that the large purple birthmark on his face is suddenly gone. Eventually he gets a letter from Kumiko that states that Noboru Wataya has been her abuser and she is going to kill him while he's unconscious.
By the end of the book Toru is back to normal. Kumiko is serving a short sentence in jail for the death of Noboru Wataya, and the Hanging House has been dismantled and sold. And Toru returns back to the place we first encounter him- back to his house to wait for Kumiko to return.
The metaphors for the spiritual work it takes to move through the horror of abuse are so complex and beautiful in this book. The whole book feels very simple and calm, and yet the stories are difficult and violent. His books are wonderful, because you get the sense that there is no easy answer, but that every person's journey to a place of spiritual freedom is unique and difficult. There is also the underlying feeling that the abused person is never alone, and that will always be someone there fighting for you to get out of that darkened room.
This book was a beautiful read, touching and powerful, but definitely not easy.
