The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Review
Interesting, wierd and surprising read. After reading my first murakami book before I was looking out for lines that looked to be red threads through the story, tying together some of the different stories. I liked finding out all the war stuff was based on facts and not made up. The supernatural stuff was also a bit more subtle than in Kafka on the shore, which I was glad to find out. Most of the supernatural stuff could be interpreted as coincidence or dreams / premonitions. The mystery of kumiko stays interesting until the end, and I liked the Metafors of the well being a place of deep introspection, shutting out the rest of the world to dive into the other world. The computer stuff felt very dated but made it have a vibe like the “lost” video series that was suspenseful. Looking forward to reading interpretations of other people online, because I believe there is a whole lot I’ve missed, such as the event of the guitar player that got assaulted without apparent reason other than delivering the baseball bat. Update: haven’t found very striking explanations yet, maybe the book can just be enjoyed as a captivating series of weirdness with a hint of a red thread, like a David Lynch screenplay.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Chapter 6
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Consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media’s tiny time segments, and it was his great advantage to be free of such things.
Chapter 8
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Powers bestowed by heaven should not be exchanged for worldly goods.
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“A life without pain: it was the very thing I had dreamed of for years, but now that I had it, I couldn’t find a place for myself within
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You want to know my name,” she said, “but unfortunately, I can’t tell you what it is. I know you very well. You know me very well. But I don’t know me.”
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That is how the world works. The stupid ones can never break free of the apparent complexity. They grope through the darkness, searching for the exit, and die before they are able to comprehend a single thing about the way of the world.
Chapter 9
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Maybe it was from the covert nature of the job, a guilty feeling I had about counting bald men in secret.
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“But finally, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, isn’t that just what life is? Aren’t we all trapped in the dark somewhere, and they’ve taken away our food and water, and we’re slowly dying, little by little …?”
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There should have been a decisive gap separating those two different worlds. There had to be a gap. But he could not find it. The world looked the same to him as it always had.
Chapter 10
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So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little.
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Kasahara. It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange.
Chapter 12
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. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a balanced grip on one’s own being.
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. A road without an entrance or exit is a strange thing, when you stop to think about it. The fundamental principle of things like roads and rivers is for them to flow. Block them and they stagnate.”
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. That was no dream, they were telling me through the mark: It really happened. And every time you look in the mirror now, you will be forced to remember it.
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“What am I doing? I’m doing the same thing you were doing, Mr. Okada,” she replied, with obvious puzzlement. “I’m thinking. This really is a perfect place for thinking, isn’t it?”
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M was supposedly instructed to go to a certain place, where she was brought into the presence of a man with a bluish mark on his face. The man, around thirty, never spoke while she was there, but his treatment was “incredibly effective.”
Chapter 13
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I opened it, to find nothing inside. It was absolutely empty. All that Mr. Honda had left me was an empty box.
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Unconsciously, however, I waited for that ray of light, that blinding flood of sunlight that poured straight down to the bottom of the well for one tiny fraction of the day.
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Yes, that was it: the true meaning of life resided in that light that lasted for however many seconds it was, and I felt I ought to die right then and there.
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Out from between the two cleanly split halves of my physical self came crawling a thing that I had never seen or touched before.
Chapter 4
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Still, the two of us share the consciousness of having had relations with each other.”
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Separating from the flesh is not so difficult. It can put me far more at ease, allow me to cast off the discomfort I feel. I am a weed-choked garden, a flightless stone bird, a dry well.
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“It’s not a question of better or worse. The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down.
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Dying is the only way / For you to float free: / Nomonhan.
Chapter 14
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Hatred is like a long, dark shadow. Not even the person it falls upon knows where it comes from, in most cases. It is like a two-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself.
Chapter 2
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I had kept it up for eleven days then, at the end of which I had followed the weird man with the guitar case into the strange apartment house lobby, where he attacked me with the bat.
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. My mark is alive, I told myself. Just as I am alive, my mark is alive.
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What was the point of my life at all if I was spending it in bed with an unknown companion?
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Never until then—never in the whole course of my life—had I grappled with questions like this. And why not? Probably because my hands had been full just living. I had simply been too busy to think about myself.
Chapter 3
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. No one would wake up anyway, no matter how big a sound they made out there. I’m the only person alive who can hear these sounds. It was that way from the start.
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It had the same effect on me as her eyes had, turning me into a vacant house. I felt empty: no furniture, no curtains, no rugs. Just an empty
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You will find your polka-dot tie, but not in your house.
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The more one tries to see into the distance, the more generalized things become.
Chapter 11
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He opened the bundle, to find a human heart inside.
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But his voice would not come out, because the one he found in the bed was himself. He was already in his bed, asleep, breathing peacefully.
Chapter 15
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I get so scared I want to scream. Does that happen to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? When it happens, I try to remind myself that I am connected to others—other things and other people.
Chapter 17
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One time—and only that once—she tried to search inside him by placing her hand on his forehead the way she did to her clients when she was “fitting” them. But she could feel nothing.
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Nutmeg found a successor during the summer of that year. The moment she saw the mark on the cheek of the young man who was sitting in front of a building in Shinjuku, she knew.
Chapter 18
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I don’t know—maybe the world has two different kinds of people, and for one kind the world is this completely logical, rice pudding place, and for the other it’s all hit-or-miss macaroni gratin.
Chapter 20
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Her consciousness left her body, wandered for a while in the spaces between memory and story, then came back.
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She realized that she had been enfolded by a great flow.
Chapter 26
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“I, as an individual, am living under the control of some outside force.” This may have been owing to the vivid blue mark on his right cheek.
Chapter 27
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The cry of this bird was audible only to certain special people, who were guided by it toward inescapable ruin.
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Nutmeg almost certainly did not know at that time that I had been given the name “Mr. Wind-Up Bird.” Which meant that I was connected with their story through some chance conjunction.
Chapter 28
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Lately, I sometimes feel like I have turned into Kumiko. I am actually Mrs. Wind-Up Bird, and I’ve run away from you for some reason and I’m hiding here in the mountains, working in a wig factory.
Chapter 33
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. I could feel only a generalized kind of sympathy for a fellow human being who had met with a sudden, violent death. That generalized emotion might be very real for me and at the same time not real at all.
Chapter 34
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People don’t always send messages in order to communicate the truth, Mr. Okada,