The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin. 613 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
One of the preoccupying themes of Japanese literature in this century has been the question of what it means to be Japanese, especially in an era that has seen the rise and fall of militarism and the decline of traditional culture. But from reading the books of Haruki Murakami, one of the country's most celebrated novelists, you'd never know he was Japanese at all: his characters read Turgenev and Jack London, listen to Rossini and Bob Dylan, eat pate de foie gras and spaghetti, and know how to make a proper salty dog. In Murakami's early books, the references to Western pop culture were sometimes so obscure that they even flew over the heads of many Americans. Murakami's protagonists are soft, irresolute men, often homebodies with dynamic girlfriends or wives, who go through long, inert periods of ennui -- a blatant renunciation of the frenetic, male-dominated ethos of modern Japan. Perhaps for that reason, his books are huge successes there: a two-volume novel called Norwegian Wood (taking its title from the Beatles song) has sold more than four million copies, making him Japan's best-selling novelist.
But he has yet to find a wide following abroad. The novels that have been published in English -- A Wild Sheep Chase, its sequel, Dance Dance Dance, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World -- occupy a shadowland between cyberpunk sci-fi, gumshoe detective fiction and hip social satire. Western critics searching for parallels have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon -- a roster so ill assorted as to suggest that Murakami may in fact be an original.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which came out in Japan two years ago, is a big, ambitious book clearly intended to establish Murakami as a major figure in world literature. Although his earlier books bristle with philosophical asides and literary allusions (always Western, of course), Japanese critics treated him as a lightweight, a wise guy who never took anything seriously. The new book almost self-consciously deals with a wide spectrum of heavy subjects: the transitory nature of romantic love, the evil vacuity of contemporary politics and, most provocative of all, the legacy of Japan's violent aggression in World War II.
The story of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (the title refers to a weird, unseen bird, whose cry is a recurring harbinger of evil) is a hallucinatory vortex revolving around several loosely connected searches carried out in suburban Tokyo by the protagonist-narrator, Toru Okada, a lost man-boy in his early 30's who has no job, no ambition and a failing marriage. When his cat disappears, he consults a whimsical pair of psychics, sisters named Malta and Creta Kano, who visit him in his dreams as often as in reality. Then his wife leaves him, suddenly and with no explanation, and he spends his days hanging out with an adolescent girl named May Kasahara, a high-school dropout obsessed with death, who works for a wig factory. At one point, seeking solitude, Toru descends to the bottom of a dry well in the neighborhood, and while he's down there, he has a bizarre experience, which might or might not be another dream: he passes through the subterranean stone wall into a dark hotel room, where a woman seduces him. This experience leaves a blue-black mark on his cheek that gives him miraculous healing powers. Eventually, he's rescued by Creta Kano, who reveals to him that she has been defiled in some hideous, unnatural way by Toru's brother-in-law, a politician whose rising career appears to be propelled by demonic powers.
As the plot proceeds, with Toru spending more and more time in the well or else in the mysterious hotel room, it becomes harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not. Toru's story is also interrupted at several points by characters who wander in to tell stories of their own, and these Boccaccio-like interpolations contain some of the best writing in the book. One, for example, is an account of a Japanese soldier's experiences in Outer Mongolia during the war. While on a spy mission in enemy territory, his outfit is captured by Mongolian and Russian soldiers. He is forced to watch one of his comrades being skinned alive, and then is left to die at the bottom of a well -- an experience that echoes or foreshadows Toru's. This story is balanced by another, in the second half of the book, about a soldier posted in Hsin-ching, the capital of Japanese-occupied Manchuria. With Chinese soldiers closing in, he is ordered to kill the animals in the zoo to prevent them from escaping. It's a terrible tale, told with icy coolness: ''The officer gave his order, and the bullets from the Model 38 rifles ripped through the smooth hide of a tiger, tearing at the animal's guts. The summer sky was blue, and from the surrounding trees the screams of cicadas rained down like a sudden shower.''
Parts of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle have the bluntness of Hemingway, and the characters frequently speak to each other in noirish riddles. Yet the novel's biggest debt is to Kafka, whose influence may have filtered down to Murakami by way of Kobo Abe, Murakami's great category-smashing predecessor. The pervasive atmosphere of alienation in Murakami's work bears a much closer affinity to the waking dreams of the German Jew in Prague than it does to the belligerent angst of the American Gen-Xers. And a resonant Kafkaesque chord is struck by another interpolated story, about a young boy whose identity is snatched by a doppelganger who steals into his bed at night. The next morning, ''the room seemed unchanged. It had the same desk, the same bureau, the same closet, the same floor lamp. The hands of the clock pointed to 6:20. But the boy knew something was strange. It might all look the same, but this was not the same place where he had gone to sleep the previous night. The air, the light, the sounds, the smells, were all just a little bit different from before. Other people might not notice, but the boy knew.''
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in Jay Rubin's polished translation, marks a significant advance in Murakami's art. He has stripped away much of the fussy pop ornamentation that in his earlier novels veered perilously near to product placement. The difference is immediately apparent if you compare the first chapter with an earlier version, published as a short story called The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women (later included in the collection The Elephant Vanishes). In the short story, Toru reads a Len Deighton novel, listens to Robert Plant on the radio and has a McDonald's cheeseburger for lunch. (How many readers of serious fiction today can identify Robert Plant, the lead singer for Led Zeppelin?) All these references are eliminated in the novel, along with ones to Cartier, Adidas, Allen Ginsberg and Penthouse magazine.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle does have its flaws, principally in its uneven design. Murakami has said that he does not plot his novels beforehand but lets the story reveal itself to him as he writes: it shows, especially in the way that neither Toru nor the novelist seems to know or care whether Toru's adventures are real or illusory. And the juxtaposition of the harrowing, all-too-real war stories with the marvelous, supernatural events in Toru's quest feels contrived. The war narratives were almost certainly composed separately and then inserted into the novel to support its grand aspirations.
Yet what Murakami lacks in finesse is more than compensated by the brilliance of his invention. As it floats to its conclusion, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle includes an almost Joycean range of literary forms: flashbacks, dreams, letters, newspaper stories and transcripts of Internet chats. And no matter how fantastical the events it describes may be, the straight-ahead storytelling never loses its propulsive force. By the book's midway point, the novelist-juggler has tossed so many balls into the air that he inevitably misses a few on the way down. Visionary artists aren't always neat: who reads Kafka for his tight construction? In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Murakami has written a bold and generous book, and one that would have lost a great deal by being tidied up.