I was recently introduced to
Haruki Murakami through his short-story collection,
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. I immediately loved the ambiance of the worlds he creates, and the mystery and ambiguity in his stories. Before I even finished all the stories in
Blind Willow, I picked up
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I was excited to have a nice, long book by a new author I was really enjoying. The book started out just like one of his short stories: the seemingly every-man character, the mysterious unexplained event, the coincidences piled on coincidences. And it just kept going like that. It was like one of his short stories turned in on itself; like a snake eating its own tail. That might not sound like a compliment but it is. Somehow, the almost fractal nature of the book made for very compelling reading. I read all 600+ pages in about 4 or 5 sittings, in one of which I devoured almost half the book.
After that marathon reading day, I started getting a little frustrated with the book. At that point, it had been curling and curling, but hadn't quite found its tail yet. I was starting to get worried that Murakami had gotten carried away and started adding weird things for the sake of being weird. Even though I was starting to get a little skeptical of the applicability of Murakami's literary devices to a novel, I still couldn't put it down. It was a page-turner. I think part of what was so appealing what that, even though the story taken as a whole is rather abstract and intellectual, the writing itself is very straight-forward and accessible. I never doubted my understanding of what was going on from moment to moment or the meaning of some passage, but the
import of what was going on was another matter entirely. The particular combination of the abstract and the mundane that Murakami uses is interesting and unusual and, to me, very appealing.
As I kept reading, the snake did eventually find its tail. The branches of the story started to come together. The connections were rarely made explicitly, but they became more apparent. What never was explained was the long series of coincidences that created those branches in the first place. But I like it better that way, and it seems to be Murakami's trademark.