Okada’s passivity in the face of the collapse of his personal life is almost pathological. By nature, he would probably sit things out and let events take charge. But he finds that strange people track him down, and try to shake him out of his reveries. Puzzling phone calls lead to an encounter with a woman named Malta Kano, who is a mystic and medium. She gives him advice but, clouded as it is in a typical Murakami fog, her guidenace is far from straightforward. “I believe you are entering a phase of your life in which many different things will occur . . . bad things that seem good at first, and good things that seems bad at first.”
And other people—invariably strange ones—also take an interest in our hero. Creta Kano, Malta’s younger sister, has plans for him that might change his life completely. His neighbor’s daughter, the attractive May Kasahara, might be his best ally or his most dangerous adversary—it’s hard to tell. Nutmeg Akasaka is another mystic, with healing powers that draw many influential people into her personal orbit. To some extent, Toru is caught up in the dreams and schemes of each of these women. They are akin to the type of visionary described by Saul Bellow’s Augie March, who are “each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe.” The only different here is that make-believe and reality are fluid concepts in the universe of Haruki Murakami, and as as Toru Okada tries on the worldviews of his different friends, peculiar things begin to happen to him.
Not everyone who crosses his path is an intriguing woman. A strange old soldier, Lieutenant Mamiya, literally comes to his door to share a long, disturbing story about his activities in Outer Mongolia during the 1930s. This powerful interlude could stand alone as a novella, and its incorporation into the text of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where it shows up roughly one-third of the way into the book, indicates how willing our author is to disrupt traditional concepts of narrative flow. This too is part of Murakami’s typical arsenal of tricks, one more way of imparting a sense of dislocation to his books, a filtering through a dream (or nightmare) landscape that seems both real and unreal.
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