November 3 1997, Time
A surreal novel portrays Japan as a postmodern wasteland of crooked deals and listless souls
In their very different ways, each of the Big Three of modern Japanese literature--Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata and Junichiro Tanizaki--devoted himself to commemorating aspects of an older, purer Japan they all felt would wither after their country's defeat in World War II. That left their postwar successors, most notably Haruki Murakami, to record the ghosts and vacant lots of a land whose spirit seemed to have vanished, leaving a soulless, synthetic wasteland of Dunkin' Donuts parlors, automated fashion victims and cinder-block abortion clinics.
Murakami--a cool 48-year-old who once ran a jazz bar, has translated John Irving, Truman Capote and Raymond Carver into Japanese and recently taught at Princeton--has been perfectly positioned to serve as the voice of hip, Westernized Japan. His Norwegian Wood (note the Beatles reference) sold more than 2 million copies around the globe. Yet none of his earlier books prepare one for his massive new The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Knopf; 611 pages; $25.95), which digs relentlessly into the buried secrets of Japan's recent past to explain the weightless, desultory disconnections of a virtual society where nothing feels real and nobody really feels.
Flowing easily through a series of hauntingly imagined passages, the story is told by Toru Okada, a guy in his 30s, out of a job, cheerfully bewildered and wandering around in a "yellow Van Halen promotional T-shirt." One day, as he's cooking spaghetti, his life suddenly falls through a rabbit hole of sorts. Spooky strangers call up with cryptic messages, women named Nutmeg and Malta enfold him in weird schemes, his wife disappears, and another woman appears in her clothes and in his bed. Reality plays like a TV program--but one showing on a channel Toru doesn't get.
As surreal life fades into waking dream (brilliantly translated into the latest vernacular by Jay Rubin), Murakami delivers a synoptic reading of all the ills of modern Japan, from crooked real estate deals to two-dimensional media men to a wonderfully true, Sprite-drinking 16-year-old girl who works in a rural wig factory. And as Okada floats through his planless days, he experiences every postmodern malady, from unwanted phone-sex calls to--the ultimate heartbreak--an E-mail "conversation" with his lost wife. These contemporary scenes of listlessness and drift are thrown into the strongest relief by gripping, graphic accounts of atrocities during the war. In Murakami's terms, a world of intense jazz has given over to one of easy listening.
It does not require much reflection to reveal that almost every image in the book's 600 pages--a dry well, a haunted house, a faceless man, a dead-end street--stands in some way for a hollowed-out Japan whose motto might be, "I don't think, therefore I am." Again and again, characters say, "I was like a walking corpse" or "I was now a vacant house" or "I felt as if I had turned into a bowl of cold porridge." Murakami's storytelling ease and the pellucid, uncluttered backdrop he lays down allow moments to flare up memorably. Yet the overall effect of his grand but somewhat abstract novel is to give us X ray after X ray into the benumbed soul of a wannabe Prozac Nation.