Reading the Wind-Up Bird resembles a roller-coaster ride, with dips and swoops,
dizzying turns, and loss of gravity amid heart-thumping plunges. The story involves a bland, Hans Castorp-type
everyman, Toru Okada, with little or no self-awareness who is increasingly and mysteriously
drawn into experiences that are unnatural and surreal. His wife disappears, he is visited by two strange
sisters, a woman who can penetrate his thoughts and phones him offering oral
sex, a precocious teen-age neighbor providing avuncular and worldly-wise advice
to the naïve Okada, and his corrupt brother-in-law who tries to pressure him to
grant a divorce to his wife and who employs the services of a sleazy gangster
to that end. Individual scenes are
memorable, the writing is lean and evocative, and the “plot” bristles with
sub-plots and twists that carry the reader via flashbacks and epistolary
narrative devices through important chapters of contemporary Japanese history.
The novel makes for an exhilarating read
even if one never quite understands what is happening. Murakami has a devoted following among
Japanese readers who seek a break from Japanese traditions and a deeper
understanding of the malaise which seemingly afflicts the country and he also
has a strong readership abroad. Nominated
for the Nobel price in literature for 2012 he fell just short but apparently may
yet win this coveted recognition for his work.
Had he been from a poor, backward country he might have already won. But Murtakami is Japanese and Japan usually
does not get the underdog vote in international competitions. Japan is unpopular with many
neighboring countries for its refusal to acknowledge its World War II guilt and
more recently for its alleged resurgent nationalism.
How to account for Murakaami’s
popularity and critical acclaim abroad and at home while also understanding the
negative reactions? His Japanese
identity, or lack of Japanese identity, is a good starting point. Unlike Japanese authors who celebrate the
glories of Japan’s martial
tradition, Murakami takes aim at the human rights abuses of Japan’s Manchurian
invasion and occupation. Through the
hero’s encounter with a Japanese veteran of WWW II and the Manchurian campaign;
the border war with Russia
and Mongolia,
and internment in a Siberian prison camp, the feckless protagonist Toru Okada
learns the horrible truth about Japanese war crimes. The anti-hero Okada, with no knowledge of
history or of much else, is an apt representation of the see-no-evil Japanese
public. Murakami, who was born in 1949
and missed the wartime period, apparently initially learned about Manchuria from his father who served there. The scenes of he border skirmish between Japan and Russia, the execution of Chinese
prisoners, and the killing of zoo animals are the most dramatic in the
book. To his admirers, Murakami’s coming
to grips with Japan’s past so memorably and unforgettably signifies his courage
by holding the mirror up to the under side of the nation’s past.
But wait. This simple explanation does not quite
fit. The portrayal of the mid-level
Japanese soldiers caught up in the tragic events is too nuanced for those who
want a more full-throated condemnation of Japanese wartime behavior. Is there an implication that a few bigwigs,
the generals and politicians, are the culprits?
After all it was small elite that made the strategic decisions and not
the mid-level soldiers were themselves victims.
The same holds for the Japanese people who were guilty only of
patriotism and behaving with the usual fidelity to authority.
Moreover the Russian prison camp in
Siberia, and the behavior of the thuggish Russian officers/prisoners who run
the camp, are far worse than any of the Japanese in Manchuria. The Russians are, unlike the Japanese soldiers,
depicted as one-dimensional villains. The
Mongolian side-kicks to the unsavory Russians are simply monsters. The chief Mongolian aide to the Russian ruler
of the prison camp, for example, specializes in skinning captured prisoners
alive. Americans are painted as being
perfectly willing to fire on defenseless women and children on a captured
vessel (until halting only because they receive word of the end of the war). The author scarcely needs to remind readers
that it was the Americans who were guilty of the greatest war crime of all by obliterating
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Thus Murakami may be seen, for some critics, as pulling his punches and providing
a subtle apologia for Japanese atrocities and for failing to acknowledge Japan’s
responsibility for starting the war in the first place.
Murakami’s relation to Japanese history
and cultural tradition is a puzzle. The
protagonist Okada is presented as a kind of blank slate; he is a postwar child,
has no knowledge of the Japanese past, and for the first part of the novel
simply filters and passes on to the reader his innocent impressions of everything
he sees and experiences. What he sees is
that the politicians are corrupt and are not to be believed, the big businessmen
are sinister and probably linked to organized crime, Japanese youth are aimless
and tuned out, and Japanese culture is trashy, shallow, and commercialized. His country is a mere caricature and
reflection of the worst aspects of low brow American culture. There is no past that is relevant to the
hapless anti-hero Okada who has no job, no ambition, and no purpose in life. He is ignorant of history until he learns
about Manchuria. And the lesson he draws from
his knowledge is that the past must be cast aside, not drawn on for guidance. The author seems to say that Japan is a
wasteland and a terra incognito, and that his countrymen, like the protagonist,
must find their salvation by forging a new identity. This identity must be an individualist one, a
break from the collective identity of the past that stresses loyalty to the
group, family cohesion, and a blind willingness to sacrifice for a glorious
tradition like the last samurai in the Hollywood
movie of a few years ago. The hero must
think for himself, and fight against big business, corrupt politicians,
stultifying mass culture, and the deadening hand of tradition. The anti-hero as the novel progresses begins
to turn into he hero. He is no longer
passive; he knows what he wants and what he believes in – and this is his love
for his wife. His relationship to his
wife is real, a human connection worth fighting for, and he has a plan, even if
it is a long shot, for defeating his enemies.
The attractive characters in The
Wind-Up Bird are the loners like the rebellious teenage girl who can’t
stand school but has a passion for wig-making.
Or like the small businessman uncle who is something of a family black
sheep but who has done well by opening a chain of restaurants (just as Murakami
himself opened and ran a bar until he made enough money through his writing to
write full-time). These characters are
“authentic” in the way J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield might view them.
Murakami artistically is breaking with
tradition as well. Suffering from what
Harold Bloom calls the “anxiety of influence,” Murakami rejects everything
Japanese: the warrior cult, the No plays, Confucianism and Buddhism, ancestor
worship, the Emperor, and the rest. He
is fashioning a more open and more democratic art. His influences are from the West: a blend of
Latin American magic realism, German 1920s surrealism, Anglo-American
modernism, and post-modern French structuralism and Lacanian psychiatric influences. The
Wind-Up Bird bristles with references to Western literature, art, and music
and has no references to traditional Japanese culture. Murakami has lived abroad, in the United States
notably, and is thoroughly familiar with and apparently comfortable with
American culture. But no sooner have we
made such observations that this picture, too, seems oversimplified. Murakami is something of a patriot in his own
way. He returned to Japan from the U.S.
in 1995 because of his desire to help his countrymen deal with one of the
destructive earthquakes that bedevil the country and in time to witness the hideous
and inexplicable Saran gas episode that killed thousands in the Tokyo subways. The
Wind-Up Bird was published s few years later and can be viewed as
Murakami’s effort to help his nation deal with tragic shocks, the shame of the
past, economic stagnation, and a general malaise by forging a new consciousness
and an ethic based on individual responsibility and human intimacy. Nor does he succeed in breaking totally from
Japanese artistic radiations. The anti-hero Okada moves toward the status of a
quiet hero because he is a modern day samurai warrior – in his case wielding a
baseball bat rather than a sword. Toru
Okada takes after his unsavory brother-in-law and other enemies with his bat as
his weapon. He symbolically slays the
modern dragons of crime, corruption, and crassness in a display of courage worthy
of the ancient samurai warriors. Murakami’s
dream-like sequences also evoke shamanistic and mythic elements that appear in
the old Japanese morality plays. His
break with his Japanese artistic forbearers is thus not quite as irrevocable
and his Westternism is not quite as complete as appears at first glance.
His evolution as a novelist shows that
he will continue to surprise and confound us even as his appeal and his
audiences grow. His most recent
book 1Q84
appearing in 2011 sold a million copies within a month of its publication
in Japan and English translations followed shortly in England and the U.S. This
work, even longer than The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle, has many of the same elements – murder, parallel universe,
sexually voracious women, cultural critique – but the plot is tighter and the
protagonist more self-conscious than the Bird’s
Toru Okada. In between these two
novels was Kafka on the Shore (2002)
which some critics the greatest of Murakami’s works. I will take up these other novels in a later
blog. For now I urge readers to take on
the exhilarating ride of The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle.
