The wind-up bird chronicle

translated from the Japanese ; by Jay Rubin.

No cover

Haruki Murakami: The wind-up bird chronicle (1998, The Harvill Press)

609 pages

English language

Published Aug. 6, 1998 by The Harvill Press.

ISBN:
978-1-86046-470-6
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
60155085

View on OpenLibrary

5 stars (1 review)

Japan’s most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II. ([source][1])

[1]: www.harukimurakami.com/book/the-wind-up-bird-chronicle

22 editions

Re-read after 20 years and it hits way differnt

5 stars

Weird and brilliant, the book constantly tempts you into decoding it’s meaning, and then immediately pulls the rug out from under your mind-feet.

I also felt like I needed a giant white board to track the seemingly endless inter-connections, parallels, and metaphors, but I’m not sure a large enough white board exists, and even if it did I’d probably just end up with a giant mess of ideas rendered less beautiful than the novel itself. All that said, his writing about female sexuality is weird and deeply uncomfortable.

Subjects

  • Missing persons -- Fiction.
  • Japanese fiction -- 20th century -- Translations into English.