Book review: Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Photo: Jesse Butler

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: The Motif of Agency

by guest examiner Ivana Simi

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, takes us on a journey following its protagonist, Mr. Toru Okada.

Mr. Okada, or (‘Mr. Wind-Up Bird’, as he is dubbed by his friend May Kasahara, a rebellious teenager who is in search of herself, has recently quit his job as a low-level employee in a law firm. He works at home, cleaning and making dinners and trying to figure out what he wants to do next, or in modern idiom what kind of person he wants to become. In short, Toru Okada believes that he is a free agent, in control of events in his life with the ability to recreate his life and self at will; Mr. Okada is a paradigm of a modern man. His wife, Kumiko Okada, works for a health magazine. Her long hours and her dedication serve as a good cover for her infidelities revealed later in the book.

In the beginning, in addition to figuring out who the next Toru Okada is (i.e. what the next Toru Okada does), our protagonist has a mission to find his and his wife’s missing cat. The disappearance of the cat, Noboru Wataya (named after Okada’s hated brother-in-law) and his future occupation mystery are, however, only the tip of the iceberg. There is a further case that Okada is supposed to solve: the disappearance of his wife. What unites these three strands is a more general puzzle about agency. Does an individual cause events to happen (finding a job/recreating one’s self, finding a cat or a wife)? Or do things simply happen to us?

Okada, like any other modern person, believes that only the future matters and that one has full control over at least one aspect of it: namely, what kind of person one is and what kind of life one leads. However, it seems that Murakami has set out to prove Toru Okada is wrong. This is foreshadowed in the book’s title. The wind-up bird is a symbol of the lack of agency. In particular, whoever hears the song of the wind-up bird becomes a hostage of events happening to him/her rather than being an agent and causing events.

To solve his problems, Okada gets acquainted with gallery of peculiar characters: Malta and Creta Kano, Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka, Lt. Mamiya. They bring together two story lines: the major one—the search for the cat, the wife, and oneself—and the minor storyline centered in and around Japan before and during Word War II, including events from The Mongolian Front, The Manchurian Incident, and Soviet Prison Camps.

Half through dreams, half through stumbling around, Okada puts together pieces of his puzzle. However, he needs to bracket himself from the everyday flow of the modern world. He does this by descending into the dry well of a yard in his neighborhood. There, he faces the historic flow of events, both individual and collective. Getting deeper in history seems to have been professed to Mr. Okada by Mr. Honda, a psychic friend of his wife’s family. Mr. Honda arranges a contact between Okada and Lt. Mamiya by having Lt. Mamiya deliver to Okada Honda’s keep-sake. Lt. Mamiya also has also spent some time in a different well on the Mongolian front as well as in a Soviet prison camp (which I can’t help but think resembles the modern workplace Okada just left).

Then there are stories of Malta and Creta Kano (a psychic women and her sister) whose story parallels, then intersects, Kumiko’s and her sister’s. We learn that like Creta Kano, Kumiko’s sister was defiled by her brother Noboru Wataya and later killed herself. Nobury Wataya himself is connected to World War II Japan through his profession (politics) and a position in a parliament inherited from his uncle. Nutmeg’s story tells us about a terrible event of a zoo killing during the Manchurian War and the role of her father in it, who is in many ways similar to Okada. The most superficial yet obvious similarity is that they both bear dark marks on their cheeks. More importantly, such a mark seems associated with healing powers. Healing become Okada’s new job.

Seemingly independent story lines converge suggesting that personal histories are entwined with the national histories: both determine an individual’s present and future life. So to bring back Kumiko, Toru Okada would have to do the impossible: he would have to change the events far beyond his control (family histories and national histories). This leads me to the focus of this review, the motif of freedom from the past and recreation of one’s self.

Can one recreate oneself? That one can is a deeply modern idea. But such an idea presupposes an absolute freedom from the past, i.e. absolute causal power, which makes sense only in a secular modern mind. To be self-made, one must have the power of a first cause. One must be a god to be able to create things ex nihilo. Marukami’s point is precisely that such is impossible because finite, fallible and fragile humans aren’t gods. If one cannot be the first cause, one’s past, to a great extent, determines future outcomes. One has only an illusion of recreation by changing clothes, perfumes or jobs. Such changes, however, are only superficial. A person might make changes like this all the time, without really thinking, though her substantive self, which determines present outcomes, retains its deeply ingrained dispositions. What holds of individuals holds of nations, in this case Japan. For a nation is no more than the collection of such individuals and shares many properties with individuals.
The tragedy of the Okadas is that they both believed the impossible—namely, that they could live like gods. However, Kumiko’s disappearance and the actions which she feels to be most natural, but wishes not to be hers, display the wind-up bird effect (a deeply ingrained disposition to act in a certain way). Perhaps the best one can hope for is a transformation; a transformation presupposes that some - thing remains the same. A transformation does not require the causal powers of the first cause. This realization is what makes May Kasahara the most hopeful character in the novel.