An epic set in motion when a cat goes
missing, Haruki Murakami's dreamlike, curiously suspenseful "The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle" has its own internal logic.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle By Haruki
Murakami. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin. Knopf; 624
pages
This certainly has been a year of large novels, very large novels, even. Haruki Murakami's latest may not be the biggest, although it is almost twice the size of his previous outings; what sets it apart is that even at 624 pages, its scale feels modest. Murakami, to all appearances the most unassuming of novelists, can successfully create the illusion that what he is up to is nothing so calculated as literature. He is writing you a letter -- artless, urgent, perplexed -- in which he tries to make sense of some odd events, giving you all the facts in proper order, hoping you will see the pattern that eludes him. This of course is a measure of just how devious he is. The apparent simplicity of his expression masks the strangeness and complexity of his books and, in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, nearly disguises the fact that it is, in the most time-honored sense, an epic.
It all begins with a lost cat. Toru Okada and his wife, Kumiko, have a cat with a bent tail whom they have named Noboru Wataya, after Kumiko's brother, whom the cat somehow resembles. The Okadas live in a Tokyo suburb; behind their house is a sealed-off alleyway, at the other end of which is an abandoned house. In a tree near this house there occasionally roosts a bird, which is never seen but only heard; its cry sounds like the winding up of a spring. Toru, the narrator, is persuaded the cat has taken off down the alley and ended up somewhere in the vicinity of the abandoned house. He has a lot of time to look for the cat, since he has recently quit his job as a paralegal. Between listening to Western classical music and preparing rather Western-style meals, he searches. So far, so good. A plot more banal could scarcely be conceived.
The search for the cat only takes a couple of hundred pages, though. Eventually it turns up, without fanfare, but in the meantime it is Kumiko who disappears, and remains missing. This is about as much of the story as takes place in the everyday world; the balance, like the submerged portion of an iceberg, occurs in the realm of dreams and the paranormal. The narrator receives strange telephone calls. Some are from a woman who insists she knows him, and who proceeds to initiate unsolicited phone sex. Others are from a woman who calls herself Malta Kano (you get the impression that this name is both funnier and more mysterious in Japanese than it sounds to us), who is a psychic and allegedly engaged in the search for the cat, although her messages and her eventual actions are enigmatic. She has a sister, called Creta Kano, who dresses in the style of an early-sixties pop singer; her appearances are as sudden and unfathomable as Malta's phone calls.
Noboru Wataya, not the cat but the brother, is a malign character, an economist who has become a powerful media personality through some sort of occult mind control. He and the narrator are mortally opposed; although Noboru Wataya never appears on the scene in flesh and blood, their struggle seems to drive the entire story. As with so much else in the book, however, the ramifications of this are never made explicit. The narrator and Kumiko married against the wishes of her family. Permission was granted only on condition that they periodically consult a soothsayer named Oishi Honda, an ailing veteran who emits sibylline pronouncements in between traumatic episodes in which he obsessively relives horrific incidents from the war. He was posted to the front in the puppet empire of Manchukuo, on the Chinese mainland, where an agonizing war of attrition was fought against the Outer Mongolians and the Soviets.
Early in the story, Honda dies. He has left the narrator a legacy, and a former comrade in arms, Lieutenant Mamiya, has been dispatched to deliver it. The box, however, turns out to be empty; it would seem that the actual gift is Lieutenant Mamiya's narrative, which runs episodically through the book. He recounts a series of incidents, some horrible, many inexplicable: the ambush in the Gobi Desert of an espionage party to which he and Honda had been assigned, the torture and execution of their commander, Mamiya's escape and miraculous rescue from certain death, his postwar internment in a nightmarish Soviet prison camp, the state of emotional numbness in which he has existed ever since. Later the narrator encounters a mysterious mother and son, who call themselves Nutmeg and Cinnamon. Although posing as fashion designers, they are actually psychic healers of some kind; in any case they are very rich. Nutmeg's tale runs in counterpoint to Lieutenant Mamiya's -- she grew up in Hsin-ching, the capital of Manchukuo, where her veterinarian father was the zoo director. Her memories obsessively turn on an incident she did not witness: the killing of the large mammals as the Soviets closed in on the city and food ran out.
The narrator finds himself becoming a sort of passive medium. He acquires a blue-black stain on his face, oddly like the one borne by Nutmeg's father, and as a result receives the power of psychic healing, although he doesn't understand it. He feels compelled to reenact the lieutenant's most profound experience -- just as the latter had for an instant seen the essence of life while hiding at the bottom of a dry well in the desert, so the narrator begins to spend increasing amounts of time at the bottom of the dry well on the grounds of the abandoned house. There he can slide into a parallel world, a shadowy hotel where the phone-sex woman is always lying in bed, audible but invisible in the darkness, and a threatening figure is always on the point of entering the room.
And that isn't the half of it. Talismanic items -- a baseball bat, a bottle of Cutty Sark, the overture to Rossini's Thieving Magpie, the cry of the wind-up bird -- migrate ceaselessly among material, historical, and metaphysical realms. So do people, for that matter, in particular the Kano sisters, who seem to shuttle between reality and other people's dreams at will. Every character, every story, nearly every circumstantial detail appears to connect with every other in some ectoplasmic cat's cradle. The one-thing-after-another recital of events by the everyman narrator is tremendously effective in suspending disbelief (and builds up quite a head of suspense as well, even concerning the missing cat). You pretty much have to put the book down and walk away from it for a while to realize just how odd it is.
Nothing, or almost nothing, is explained. At the very end, after the narrator has finally faced down the unknown intruder in the dream hotel, one strand of the narrative at least acquires a shape, if not an interpretation -- this is where you realize that you've been reading an epic. In the meantime, you just travel through the narrator's adventures, drawn along as hypnotically as he is. Away from the book, you try out various skeleton keys: historical, psychoanalytic, literary-critical. Are the hotel episodes versions of the primal scene? Is the whole thing an allegory of Japanese nationalism and ambivalence and guilt? How about the bird imagery that crops up all over the place? But every interpretation, however semi-plausible, seems crudely reductive. The book's internal logic has the ironclad self-sufficiency of a dream. It is useful, as ever, to remember that a work of literature is not a tool or a code or a map but an object, period. The Wind-Up Bird is as sculpted and implacable as a bird by Brancusi.
You might, though, entertain a passing suspicion that something has been lost in translation, less because of unresolved enigmas than because the prose is constantly reminding you of its secondhand status. The dialogue in particular has all the rhythm and nuance of a hastily overdubbed foreign movie: "Look, I know how busy you are, but give me a break. I want to know what's going on. What's with the cat?" To come across such formulations in a novel not written by Franklin W. Dixon raises questions about how many shadings the translator might have flung overboard expeditiously, both there and in the less demotic passages. This in turn makes the reader wonder about the weight of allusion in the book -- musical references abound, all of them Western, from Schumann to Percy Faith, while the historical matters are likely to lie outside the ken of non-Japanese readers. There are implicit social critiques in the novel -- regarding the war, the media, party politics, corruption -- that I can detect while being ill-equipped to appreciate their exact resonance. The same could be said, of course, of anyone's reaction to a foreign novel. But such a thing is conspicuous here because of the gap that yawns between the enigmatic substance of the book and the often slipshod language in which it is cast. Murakami, some kind of wizard, deserves better.