The wind-up bird chronicle

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Haruki Murakami: The wind-up bird chronicle (1997, Alfred A. Knopf)

Hardcover, 611 pages

English language

Published Aug. 6, 1997 by Alfred A. Knopf.

ISBN:
978-0-679-44669-9
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5 stars (2 reviews)

Japan’s most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II. (source)

25 editions

Re-read after 20 years and it hits way differnt

5 stars

Weird and brilliant, the book constantly tempts you into decoding it’s meaning, and then immediately pulls the rug out from under your mind-feet.

I also felt like I needed a giant white board to track the seemingly endless inter-connections, parallels, and metaphors, but I’m not sure a large enough white board exists, and even if it did I’d probably just end up with a giant mess of ideas rendered less beautiful than the novel itself. All that said, his writing about female sexuality is weird and deeply uncomfortable.

Subjects

  • Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
  • Japan -- Fiction