The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (ねじまき鳥クロニクル, Nejimakidori Kuronikuru) is a novel published in 1994–1995 by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The American translation and its British adaptation, dubbed the "only official translations" (English), are by Jay Rubin and were first published in 1997. For this novel, Murakami received the Yomiuri Literary Award, which was awarded to him by one of his harshest former critics, Kenzaburō Ōe.
The original Japanese edition was released in three parts, which make up the three "books" of the single volume English language version.
In English translation, two chapters were originally published in The New Yorker under the titles "The Zoo Attack" on July 31, 1995, and "Another Way to Die" on January 20, 1997. A slightly different version of the first chapter translated by Alfred Birnbaum was published in the collection The Elephant Vanishes under the title "The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday's Women". In addition, the character name Noboru Wataya appears in the short story "Family Affair" in The Elephant Vanishes. While having a similar personality and background, the character is not related to the one in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle of the same name. Noboru Wataya is also used in Jay Rubin's translation of the title short story in The Elephant Vanishes.
In May 2010, Harvill Secker published the Limited Centenary Edition of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to celebrate the publisher's hundredth year of operation. It was limited to 2,500 copies.
The first part, "The Thieving Magpie", begins with the narrator, Toru Okada, a low-key and unemployed lawyer's assistant, being tasked by his wife, Kumiko, to find their missing cat. Kumiko suggests looking in the alley, a closed-off strip of land behind their house. After Toru stays there for a while with no luck, May Kasahara, a teenager who had been watching him camping out in the alley for some time, questions him. She invites him over to her house in order to sit on the patio and look over an abandoned house that she says is a popular hangout for stray cats. The abandoned house is revealed to possibly contain some strange omen, as it had brought bad luck to all of its prior tenants. It also contains an empty well, which Toru uses later to crawl into and think. Toru receives sexual phone calls from a woman who says she knows him. He also receives a phone call from Malta Kano who asks to meet with him.
Kumiko calls Toru to explain that he should meet with the clairvoyant Malta Kano, who will help with finding the cat. Malta Kano had come recommended by Kumiko's brother, Noboru Wataya, which is also the name given to the cat. Kumiko's family believes in fortune-telling and had previously stipulated that the couple meet with an elderly man, Mr. Honda, for consultations on a regular basis, which they did for some time. (Instead of giving advice, he spends most of their sessions retelling the same story of his experience in the Kwantung Army in the lost tank battle with the Russians at Nomonhan on the Manchukuo-Russian border during World War II.) Toru meets the mysterious Malta Kano at a busy hotel restaurant, and she tasks her sister Creta Kano to further the work. Both sisters wear unusual clothing: Malta a large red hat and Creta unstylish 1960s clothing. Creta meets Toru at his home and begins to tell him the story of her past, involving being raped by Noboru, but abruptly leaves. Toru notices Kumiko is wearing perfume that has been gifted to her by some unknown person. The cat remains missing. Toru is contacted by Lieutenant Mamiya, who informs Toru that Mamiya's old war friend corporal Honda has died and that Mamiya wishes to visit Toru to drop off an item that Honda had bequeathed to him. The first section ends with Lieutenant Mamiya arriving and telling Toru a long tale about his eerie and mystical wartime experiences in Manchukuo in the Kwantung Army, where he sees a man skinned alive. Mamiya was also left to die in a deep well before being saved by corporal Honda. The gift from Honda is an empty box.
Kumiko is revealed to be missing at the start of the second part, "Bird as Prophet". Shortly after, Toru finds out through a meeting with Noboru and Malta that Kumiko has apparently been spending time with another man and wants to end her relationship with Toru. Confused, Toru tries several things to calm himself and think through the situation: talking and taking up work with May Kasahara, hiding at the bottom of the well, and loitering around the city looking at people. Work with May involves tallying up people with some degree of baldness at a subway line for a wig company. While at the bottom of the well (of the abandoned house), Toru reminisces about earlier times with Kumiko, including their first date to an aquarium where they looked at jellyfish. He also experiences a dreamlike sequence where he enters a hotel room and speaks with a woman, and notices a strange blue mark on his cheek after he leaves the well. While loitering in the city, he spends most of the day sitting outside a donut shop and people-watching. Through this activity, Toru encounters a well-dressed woman and also a singer he recognizes from his past, whom he follows and beats with a bat after getting ambushed by him.
"The Birdcatcher", the third, final, and lengthiest part, ties up most loose ends while introducing a few new characters. The well-dressed woman Toru met while people-watching is revealed to be Nutmeg, whom he sees again when he reverts to people-watching. She hires him to relieve clients, middle-aged or older women, of some kind of inner turmoil that develops inside of them. The blue mark is involved in this somehow, though its power is never fully explained. In return, Toru receives pay and partial possession of the abandoned house that had been purchased to resell by some property agency. Cinnamon, Nutmeg's son, maintains the house and refits the well with a ladder and pulley to open and close the well cap from the bottom. Toru periodically goes to the bottom of the well to think and attempt to revisit the hotel room. The cat, who has been hardly mentioned following Kumiko's disappearance, shows up at Toru's home after nearly a year of being missing. Toru discusses Kumiko's disappearance with Noboru directly and indirectly (through his agent Ushikawa) and eventually arranges for a talk with her through the Internet, using her recollection of the jellyfish date as a means to verify her identity. Finally, Toru is able to travel to the hotel room from the well and confronts the woman, realizing that she is Kumiko and breaking the spell. It is revealed in this reality that Noboru has been beaten into a coma by a bat, with the assailant described to look just like Toru. An unknown man enters the hotel room and attacks Toru, the intruder, with a knife. Toru fights back with the bat and kills the man, before escaping back to the well. In the well, bruised and unable to move, Toru passes out after the well fills with water. Cinnamon saves him, and some days later Nutmeg notifies him that in this reality Noboru had a stroke and is now in a coma. Kumiko sends him a message on the computer to let him know she is alright but intends to kill Noboru by pulling the plug on the life support. She reveals that she did not cheat on Toru with just one man, but in fact there were several. Noboru's obsession with their middle sister, continued with Kumiko, triggered sex addiction in her until Noboru stepped in. Subsequently, in a discussion between Toru and May, Toru says Kumiko was successful in killing Noboru and is now serving time in jail after admitting the deed — time of her own volition, because she is waiting for the media circus to end so neither she nor Toru are targeted. Toru says that he will wait for her, and bids May goodbye.
While this book has many major and minor characters, these are among the most important:
The English translation of the novel was carried out by Jay Rubin. In addition to notable differences between the Japanese and English versions, there are also differences between the original Japanese hardcover and paperback editions.
Further differences exist between the American and British editions, but these are much more superficial.
The German translation by Giovanni and Ditte Bandini is based on the English translation, not on the Japanese original. Nearly 20 years after the first translation Ursula Gräfe translated the book from the Japanese original, including also the missing chapters. 'Die Chroniken des Aufziehvogels'.
The Dutch translation by Jacques Westerhoven was translated directly from the Japanese original, therefore includes the missing parts and chapters, and follows the same order as the Japanese version.
Some chapters and paragraphs of the Japanese paperback edition were not included in the English translation. Translator Jay Rubin cut about 61 of 1,379 pages, including three chapters (Book 2 Chapters 15, 18, and part of 17; and Book 3 Chapter 26). Combining the original three-volumes (Japanese) would have been too long, and so the publisher requested that ~25,000 words be cut for the English translation, even though Rubin had presented them a complete translation along with the requested abridged version.
These chapters contain plot elements not found elsewhere in the book. For example, the two missing chapters from the second volume of the original three-volume elaborate on the relationship between Toru Okada and Creta Kano, and a "hearing" of the wind-up bird as Toru burns a box of Kumiko's belongings (Book 2 Chapter 15). In the third volume, the computer conversation between Toru and Noboru Wataya (Book 3 Chapter 26) and Toru's encounter with Ushikawa at the train station are also omitted.
In addition to reducing the word count, some chapters were moved ahead of others, taking them out of the context of the original order. At the start of Book 3 the chapters have been rearranged. Rubin combined two chapters called "May Kasahara's POV" and moved the "Hanging House" chapter to make the chronology of events consistent.
Book 2 chapter 15 summary: In chapter 15 Toru awakens to Creta Kano who mysteriously appeared in his bed the night before. She tells him that she has lost her name and asks if he would like to flee Japan with her. To this request he agrees and leaves behind memorabilia of his old life with his wife. While Toru is in town gathering supplies for his flee he reads an article about Noboru Wataya, the article explains that Noboru is now trying to become a politician.
Chapter 17 is not completely removed, instead the excerpt where Toru takes passport photos is removed and the very lengthy conversation Toru has with his uncle about buying real estate is condensed into one English paragraph.
Book 2 Chapter 18 summary: Creta Kano returns to Japan and Toru tells her that he will not be fleeing with her. After this he meets with May Kasahara and they watch the demolition of the Miyawaki house. Later in the chapter Toru is swimming at the ward pool where he dreams in the pool about floating at the bottom of the well, presented in earlier chapters, and hearing horses dying during an eclipse. This leads him to the realization that the mysterious woman on the phone was actually his wife. Ending book 2 with this cliff hanger.
Upon release, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was generally well-received. Globally, Complete Review saying on the consensus "All find points to praise, but there is no consensus on the book as a whole. Some believe it is a successful, well-rounded piece, others that it has too many loose end[s]".
Kirkus Reviews wrote that the novel was "a major work bringing signature themes of alienation, dislocation, and nameless fears through the saga of a gentle man forced to trade the familiar for the utterly unknown" and "a fully mature, engrossing tale of individual and national destinies entwined" that would be "hard to surpass."
Michiko Kakutani, in The New York Times, regarded the novel as "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 mythic and historical significance" though was "only intermittently successful." While she finds that the novel succeeds in articulating that the world is "a mysterious place", that same confusion also "seems so messy that its refusal of closure feels less like an artistic choice than simple laziness".
Many regard The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as Murakami's masterpiece, and it appeared in The Telegraph's 2014 list of the 10 all-time greatest Asian novels.
An adaptation of the novel was created by Stephen Earnhart; a live production of it premiered in 2011 at the Edinburgh International Festival.