"A well without water. A bird that can't fly. An alley with no exit."
Phew. And a book with no ending and no answers.... The Wind-up Bird Chronicle took me quite some time to get through, and I am a fast reader! It took me a while because every word and every sentence seem to be important in order to understand the overall picture and mystery of the unfolding story of Toru Okada, an unemployed married 30-year-old man in a Tokyo suburb. The story is a period in his life of big changes--his cat disappears and then his wife Kumiko leaves him. Interwoven with his story are other tales which are intermittenly tangential tales of other people's fates and intermittently stories or events relevant to his life or circumstances. Various characters appear and disappar in a dreamlike fashion. Some of Toru Okada's experiences seem like hallucinations. But hallucinations that leave permanent physical scars like a mark in his face from "passing through a wall." He is described as an ordinary unremarkable nobody, but his reactions to the environment and his actions (e.g., climbing into a deep dark dry well for extendend periods) are not ordinary nor are any of the other characters or their actions. Reading this book was at times compelling and at times both annoying and amazing. It is like partaking in somebody's hallucinatory dream of good and evil. It's intriguing and a 6.
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