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12.27.4

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The short version of my plaint about the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is "too much like Twin Peaks." The hype made me expect something sprawling, messy, and revelatory - instead I found the book fastidious, sentimental, and predictable. Here are some quick notes about it:

• The translation (by Jay Rubin, IIRC) made the book a very awkward read. At some point it said Malta Kano had "undergone austerities": wtf? Plus I hope for his sake that Murakami has not realized just how ridiculous Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka's names sound in English. To his credit, the Rubin manages to eliminate a lot of the common, too-obvious artifacts of translation from the Japanese, e.g. ending lots of spoken sentences with ", huh?" and beginning lots of narrative sentences with conjunctions. But none of it sounded natural, and ultimately it was hard for me to get past it.

• I didn't find the characters real or realistic, and as archetypes they filled roles that didn't particularly interest me. It was okay that Toru Okada the narrator-hero was barely characterized, since he was supposed to be an Everyman. But as far as the other male characters go I didn't see any difference between villans Noboru Wataya and the Mongolian Skinner - both were vaguely defined as evil, capable of everything. The point where Wataya is described as the "opposite" of Okada I found sophomoric and unnecessary. Just calling someone the antihero does not make him one.

• Props to the person who guessed that the female characters pissed me off. Women are seen as primarily sexual - sexual or vaginal encounters form nearly all the pivotal events in women's lives - with mystical and secretive overtones. The female characters are almost entirely passive and reactive, expressing themselves only through fashion choices and sexual contact. Malta Kano exerts her so-called agency by initiating all interpersonal contact, yet she never actually does anything. The moon seems to play more of a part in affecting their behavior than their actual personalities do.

• Creating an atmosphere of wistful melancholy may be an aesthetic goal for Japanese literature, but it is one that I am impatient with.

• I found the symbolism fundamentally uninteresting and unrewarding. At the end of the book you find out that the events that transpired hinged around a phenomenon that, I quote, "awakened the dormant something", thus setting into action a certain chain of events. I did not consider "dormant something" an explanation worth wading through six hundred pages for.

• Creta Kano's so-called "rape." Don't get me started.

• Due to having watched way too much of it, I am very good at guessing the outcome of B-movies and sensationalistic TV, but in general, I can't really guess the outcomes of books in advance. I did correctly guess the two "shocking revelations" in this one: what does that say about the book's subtlety? It was mostly due to the way Okada keeps on harping over and over about Kumiko's first sexual experience. I did make one mistake where I thought Malta and Creta Kano would be explicitly revealed to be Kumiko's sister and a disguised Kumiko, mostly because the ratio of female characters to female archetypes seemed way too high, and had to be content with them merely symbolizing an alternate Kumiko and her sister.

I know that this is a book which can inspire fierce loyalty, and I just want to say, I can certainly imagine that other people might like it, but it is so definitely not the book for me.

Thanks for the Oxfam and TsunamiHelp links. I did fundraising for Oxfam briefly in high school and liked their work, so I went with them. After talking to my dad about it, I have some angry feelings about the tsunami. Waves do not travel instantaneously, and by the time the wave struck Somalia or even Sri Lanka, there would have been plenty of time to evacuate the waterfront, if only the infrastructure and technology to spread the word had been in place. "In Japan they have tsunami monitors that continuously check the water level... Hopefully this is the last time in history that something like this will happen," says my dad, the perennial optimist.

Anyway... off to read Cloud Atlas and play Spellcasting 201 (having finished Spellcasting 101)...

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