Books to read: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ok! Let me make sure I’m back in the realm of reality first…yes.. It appears so!

The story of Toru Okada, and his unexpected journey battling a new kind of darkness, is the longest and most thrilling of Murakami yet! What an engaging and interesting tale and Murakami delivers once again.

Having read seven of his other books, there are a lot of patterns and similarities starting to find shape in my mind. This is not a bad thing and there are still so many innovations, surprises and twists that make “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” anything but predictable. There’s a sense of more maturity in the way the events unfold and the outcome of things that I feel comes from the author’s change of view on life as he is aging. It feels, to me, that the laws of reality are creeping into his imaginations.

I especially enjoyed how he was experimenting with different time lines, some of which neither involved the protagonist directly nor actually occurred. They were but the creations of other characters’ minds and we break away from Toru’s narration through them.

There are so many characters in this book all connected together, although it may not appear on the surface. They inform each other beautifully and peel away from the mysteries surrounding Toru, who is often kept in the dark often even more than the reader! You wish you could whisper quietly to him “hey! you are not alone!” but at the end he doesn’t need anyone’s help once he accepts his fate.

As with other Murakami’s books, I feel a little sad to have reached the end. I wish I could stay in his fascinating mind a little longer… or perhaps there’s no time to waste! To the next!