Read More: Our review of Killing Commendatore While the word ‘relatable’ is tossed around too much these days, there may well be a reason for that, and Okada, despite his journey through a labyrinthine hotel and spending half his time at the bottom of a well, is certainly relatable.

Murakami’s search for identity stretches beyond the personal and into the national, as Okada befriends a survivor of the Japanese occupation of Manchuko (Manchuria), Lieutenant Mamiya, whose tales of war and terror bring into question the concept of will, personal stakes, national direction, and parallels of Okada’s personal theme of being lost. These sympathies have arguably been extended through the character of Toru Okada. Murakami once told an interviewer: “ You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. He is food that has no interest in being eaten by the world, and so the world swallows him up without his permission. In this way, the shifting and changing of the world around him, in a metaphorical but also metaphysical way, acts as a gullet, forcing Okada through it, indifferent towards the man’s own wishes.

Okada is lost, too, but he sees no need to search. Wataya is a man driven by an obsession with success and power the Kano sisters who help Okada search for his cat, and later his wife, are very sure of their skills and their jobs, and even go to great lengths to tell their own personal backstories to Okada.Įven May Kasahara, the lonely and fractured teenager whom Okada befriends, is lost but always searching for her place in the world. The people Okada meets on his journey – or perhaps wanderings is a better word – differ wildly from one another, but all share a common theme which keeps them all opposed to Okada himself: they all, strange and absurd as they may be, maintain a clear sense of personal identity. Okada and his wife, Wataya’s sister, have even taken to naming their cat after this villainous academic, arguing that this is because the cat resembles him, but in fact doubling down on – indeed encouraging – the looming shadow of Wataya that is draped over their lives. Toru Okada, our unsuccessful and futureless protagonist, is constantly at odds with his brother-in-law, the obviously psychopathic and hugely successful intellectual, Noboru Wataya. This novel is an enormously abstract journey, taking place in a dry and still world. Toru has no plan and has seemingly taken to not caring as a means of coping with what may create in many others a deep and palpable anxiety. Having recently left his job with a positive attitude toward change and a fresh start, it is jarring and contradictory to see that Toru’s attitude towards life is entirely passive and apathetic.

In The Wind-Up Bird Chroniclewe are lost in the life of Toru Okada, a thirty-year-old suburban husband.

Murakami the wind up bird chronicle