The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami

How do you explain a Murakami work? Well, borrowing a notion from my friend Je, it's a Beer Book. What's a Beer Book anyway?

According to him a Beer Book is something like this, it isn't for everyone. Beer tastes bitter at first but if you get past that and let the taste and then the goodness settle in your stomach you can actually feel that the world is somewhat different than what you're used to. Reality becomes blurred while consciously you attain a certain amount of clarity. Well, technically that if you've downed an entire case and your limit is only up to three bottles. Simply put, it takes some getting used to; an acquired taste so to speak. But if you like it it stays with you. Of course too much of it results in a beer gut which doesn't look good, but that's due to real beer.

Reading Murakami is reading a Beer Book. His reality is different from ours because things happen in his stories or novels that are quite inexplicable and yet totally and utterly believable. Case in point, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

It starts simply enough; a young man named Toru Okada is looking for his cat who has gone missing for sometime. He has all the free time in the world to do so because he has no job for the time being. In the course of searching for the cat he met a handful of people, was left by his wife supposedly for another man, acquired a well-paying if somewhat dubious job in the process, traveled through walls and battled wits and brute force with a handful of shadowy villains, and ended up with the missing cat somehow in the course of this 600+ pages worth of storytelling.

Oh and don't let that put you off if you've been meaning to pick up this tome. No matter how much I try to encapsulate the entire story, it will be a different experience for each and every reader that it actually won't matter if I tell you that Toru Okada walked through walls.

What I wasn't expecting actually is that this is a book about wars. Well I should learn my lessons really. I've been reading and enjoying Murakami for sometime now I should not expect anything at all as to where his stories would go.

But yes, this is a book about wars. Particularly the people in the background and caught up in the orders of the day and they had no choice but to follow those otherwise it would mean either desertion or even treason. It's a book about consequences of wars that remain after the last gunshot has been fired and atrocities hopefully accounted for, and the scars that people carry up to this day. Murakami makes you view things differently. He might be writing about the war but he doesn't preach, he merely observes. And those observations are heart-wrenching whichever side you were on in the course of the second world war.

It's also a book about the ties that bind us to others, call it psychic or intuitive understanding. The comfort of certain strangers and the enmity of relatives by affinity. The stories they tell and how that changes your perception of self and the reality around you. Of what fate has in store for you and whether you can change things as you go along.

And on yet another level it is a story about taking control of your life as it fluctuates from one reality to the next. You take everything that you can - the lessons learned, the bruises and scars acquired - and hopefully make a better life, a better self out of it.

As always, I like his perception of everyday things. It's like he gathered random threads of thoughts and formed a character or a story or just something out if it, and gave it meaning and recognition. Lines like the following:

I have come to think that life is far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment - perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelations, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.

which is serious and heavy and then there's this:

Can you imagine the confusion if somebody born in June was named May?

which made me laugh and think and laugh and some more.

Oh, I laugh easily though.

Other interesting points of view:
Things Mean A Lot
Beastmomma

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This is the first book I finished for the Japanese Literature Challenge hosted by Bellezza and my first read of the year. I know I said last year I might read Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse first. But it started out as way too serious reading for me for the month of December. Funny though that I stopped reading that because I didn't want to read a book about the bombing of Japan during the holidays only to end up reading a book about the Second World War eventually. Oh well, that's life.