The New Canon: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

The New Canon is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on great works of fiction published since 1985. These books represent the finest literature of the current era, and are gaining recognition as the new classics of our time. In this installment of The New Canon, Gioia looks at The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.

“The Orient,” Edward Said writes at the beginning of his oft-cited study Orientalism, “was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.” Here is a formula, and a very familiar one. Yet one could easily apply these same descriptors in summing up the fictive—and very non-formulaic—world of Haruki Murakami, Japan’s most famous novelist and one of the most compelling authors of recent times.

Are these recurring elements imposed by the author’s self-imposed Western notions?—the jazz-loving Murakami, after all, is markedly Americanized, a translator of US books into Japanese who taught at Princeton and Tufts. On the other hand, this writer seems to derive his sense of “otherness”—another favorite Said term there—from the depths of his own psyche rather than from the free-floating ideologies of our time. Indeed, few novelists are less susceptible to reductive sociological frameworks, whether homegrown or imported from afar, than Haruki Murakami. In that great tradition of fiction, he creates his own universe, rather than borrows ours.

Uncanny, haunting, romantic, exotic. These elements were evident in Murakami’s early writings, notably his immensely successful novel Norwegian Wood—which sold four million copies in Japan after its 1987 publication. But his later works add large doses of fantasy and magical realism to the brooding J.D. Salinger-esque narratives and alienated young protagonists that had long been his calling card. Even before Norwegian Wood, he had dipped into the mystical with his Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. But since the publication of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami’s weaving together of urban realism and eerie fantasy has become his trademark style.

We still have the alienated young protagonist at the center of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Toru Okada has left his job as a “gofer” in a law firm, and instead of studying to pass the bar, he settles into a routine of housekeeping, doing laundry, buying groceries, cooking dinner and waiting for his wife Kumiko to come home from her work as editor of a health food magazine. But one day his wife doesn’t come home.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool. You can follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tedgioia.

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