The Windup Bird Chronicle

 Finally, I've finished reading Haruki Murakami's Kronik Burung Pegas (The Windup Bird Chronicle), a thousand page tome that I've been working on over the past year and more, with admittedly many breaks taken during the process. It did not strike me at any point that there was any hurry or necessity to get to the end of this long and wandering road, and certainly one does not feel pressed by the narrative itself. Rather, one does better to check in every now and then, spend some quality time with Murakami (or rather with Toru Okada, his main character in this novel), and then let it rest for a while. He'll be there when we get back, and in pretty much the same place we left him. 

This is not to say that the novel is not engaging, but only that it is not urgent. I am reminded of what an old college professor of mine once said about Henry James' The Turn of the Screw--that it is a ghost story wherein nothing happens and there is no ghost. Yet the atmosphere, the artistry, the voice, the details, the multitude of small epiphanies irresistibly attract. 

There is something about reading Murakami, for me anyway, that is like an easygoing, genial friendship. It's great just to sit back and listen, enjoy the unusual deck of characters he deals from, observe the interactions and study the meaning of the results. I often found myself drawn back to an extended period of reading by one particular character, Mei Kasahara, a bright, quirky, decidedly troubled, wholly delightful teen girl who strikes up a friendship with Okada, taking a keen interest in his history and in the mission he has set for himself. It is these everyday connections, and their own stories, that both move the novel along and expand its focus ever more widely--which may, often enough, leave the reader with a 'Wait, where were we?' feeling. But that's okay, because, after all, we are just living alongside Okada. That's where we are. There is a goal, yes. At first it is just to find a pet cat that has disappeared. Over time, things become much more complex indeed, much more confusing. The irony is that the more obscure the picture becomes, the more tangled the events, the more clearly focused and purposeful Okada's goal becomes within his own mind and soul.