the wind up bird chronicle by haruki murakami

The central story concerns one Toru Okada, a gofer at a Tokyo law firm who has recently quit his job. The narrative's awkward construction, the impression it gives of being jerry-built out of an arbitrary accretion of episodes and digressions. ``Wind-Up Bird'' apparently grew out of an earlier Murakami story called ``The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Woman'' (which can be found in the 1993 collection ``The Elephant Vanishes''), and its origins perhaps explain The mechanical cry of the wind-up bird that the book's hero sporadically hears is the sound of history winding its spring, the setting into motion of events that will reverberate through public and The difference between ``Wind-Up Bird'' and Murakami's earlier books is that this volume not only limns its hero's efforts to achieve self-understanding, but also aspires to examine Japan's burden of historical guilt and place Like those earlier novels, it sends its hero off on a long, strange wild goose chase that turns into a sort of It features a very ordinary man as its hero _ a passive, affectless sort of guy with a lowly job and even lower expectations. Like ``A Wild Sheep Chase'' and ``Dance Dance Dance,'' Like so many of Murakami's previous stories, ``Wind-Up Bird'' is part detective story, part Bildungsroman, part fairy tale, part science-fiction-meets-Lewis Carroll.

World, Murakami has written a fragmentary and chaotic book.

In trying to depict a fragmented, chaotic and ultimately unknowable ``Wind-Up Bird'' has some powerful scenes of antic comedy and some shattering scenes of historical power, but such moments do not add up to a satisfying, fully fashioned novel. But while Murakami seems to have tried to write a book with the esthetic heft and vision of, say, Don DeLillo's ``Underworld'' or Salman Rushdie's ``The Moor's Last Sigh,'' he Haruki Murakami's latest novel, ``The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,'' is a wildly ambitious book that not only recapitulates the themes, motifs and preoccupations of his earlier work, but also aspires to invest that material with weighty mythicĪnd historical significance. 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle': A Nightmarish Trek Through History's Web

The wind up bird chronicle by haruki murakami