The other, even more central male character in this novel is Toru’s brother-in-law Noboru Wataya. As the book evolves, this disagreeable figure becomes poised as the antithesis and adversary of Okada. If Toru is indecisive and passive, Wataya is driven and power-hungry. If Toru is a failure in the eyes of the world, Wataya is a prodigious success. He has parlayed his notoriety as an author into fame as a media pundit, and now politics looms as his next arena of dominance.
Is the disappearance of Okada’s wife linked somehow to her brother? If so, how can Okada take on one of the most admired and influential individuals in society? A conflict between the two deepens as the book progresses, but in true Murakami fashion, it is a battle that takes place in a mystical quasi-alternative universe. Our hero finds that his own sense of mastery require a paradoxical increase of his own passivity—almost to the point of complete sensory deprivation. This part of the story is odd, even by Murakami’s loose standards of realism.
In truth, much of this book takes on an almost zen-like opaqueness, a resistance to logical categories and syllogistic thinking. Certain charged incidents and agents—confinement in the bottom of a well, a missing cat, a debonair man who hasn’t spoken since age six, an unlucky house, and the call of the recurring wind-up bird (yes, there is one)—each add to the growing weirdness of the tale. And, as always in Murakami, we have final resolution. But when you add it up, the numbers don’t really compute—not the way readers have come to expect from most novels. In a different age, this might have been Oriental “otherness.” Then again, in the future they might just label it as Murakami-esque.
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