The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

On the surface, this surreal mystery is about a man's search for his wife. Toru Okada, who recently quite his low-level job at a law firm, wakes one day to find that his wife, Kumiko, has left him. Ostensibly, the book is about Okada's attempt to find her and win her back. But I think the book is really about Okada's search for himself -- really, for all of ourselves.

The wind-up bird of the title seems to refer to the fact that our lives are not really of our own choosing. We are like a mechanical animal, walking through life according to the a plan set in motion by some invisible hand. Okada explains, "This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me" (262). Another character, sent to convince Okada to give up his efforts to get his wife back, builds on the theme:  "The name is Ushikawa. That's ushi for "bull" and kawa for "river."Funny: the more I hear that, the more I feel like a real bull. I even feel a kind of closeness whenever I happen to see a bull out in a field somewhere. Names are funny things, don't you think, Mr. Okada? Take Okada, for example. Now, there's a nice, clean name: 'hill-field' I sometimes wish I had a normal name like that, but unfortunately, a surname is not something you're free to pick...They say a name expresses the thing it stands for, but I wonder if it isn't the other way around -- the thing gets more and more like its name" (428). Again, the key idea here is that the character has little choice in who he is, how he acts, or what he becomes. Finally, from a veterinarian in Japan's colonial outpost of Manchuria: "Not that he was a passive creature; indeed, he was more decisive than most, and he always saw his decisions through...He was certainly no fatalist as most people use the word. And yet never once in his life had he experienced certainty that he and he alone had arrived at a decision. He always had the sense that fate had forced him to decide things to suit its own convenience. On occasion, after the momentary satisfaction of having decided something of his own free will, he would see that things had been decided beforehand by an external power cleverly camouflaged as free will, mere bait thrown in his path to lure him into behaving as he was meant to" (509-510). Murakami seems to bring in Manchuria to point out the toll this way of thinking wreaks on the world. The battle between Japanese, Russian, and Chinese forces for control over the area result in untold horrors, carried out by people whose actions are unquestioningly carried out when they are "ordered" by superior officers.

It is this predictability in the world's actions, the fact that it is determined by the winding of a spring, allows certain people the ability to peer into the future and divine its events. Several of these figures pop up throughout the novel, including an old soldier named Honda and two sisters, Malta and Creto Kano.

But if the world is run like a wind-up bird, it begs the question: Who is doing the winding? Not these diviners -- and not anybody good. One of these people seems to be Okada's brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya, who seems to have the ability to wind, unwind, and rewind people to give them new personalities and behavioral patterns in order to serve his own purposes. It is with Wataya that Okada finally has to do battle to get Kumiko back. He does it by retreating underground, to a dried-up well on a neighboring property. There, in complete blackness, he is able to leave the "wind-up world" and enter the shadowy labyrinth where the winding happens. Okada explains, "Eventually, though, silence descended and began to burrow its way into the folds of my brain, one after another, like an insect laying eggs. I opened my eyes, then closed them again. The darknesses inside and out began to blend, and I began to move outside of myself, the container that held me. As always" (445).

Spoiler alert: Okada wins. Which complicates my thinking about Murakami's world view. Is he saying that we really don't have free will, that we are all subject to a fate determined by someone or something else? Or is he saying that this is true for those of us who don't stop to consider those forces that are trying to manipulate our identities, those who never hear the call of the wind-up bird? Okada's victory seems to point to the latter, to the idea that these dark forces can be overcome if confronted. But it takes work to find them.