Murakami's "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle"

In this beautifully strange book Murakami tries to present a reality that is eventually broken open into an increasing irreality, and the narrator's struggle to get back to the "real" life he once led. Along the way we are presented with a colorful cast of characters, intense and vivid sensory/ consciousness details, a stunning use of dream sequences and imagery, a series of intriguing stories within the main story, and synchronistic interconnections between all the events, details, and characters that left me quite curious to keep turning each page to see just where it was all leading.

While being rather brilliantly written in these terms, enough that I highly enjoyed it, I was left slightly unsatisfied at the end for several technical reasons. The reality which the narrator originally inhabits is never clearly fleshed out so it is difficult to tell how far from it he moves (most likely due to cultural assumptions). The intense use of details and consciousness sometimes seem overwritten and don't add to the flow of the story's already tenuous plot. And for a story that relies on the interconnectedness of events and small details, many of the characters and events seem to randomly vanish as if they were threads that the author either never figured out what to do with or just forgot about when another more exciting detail suggested itself. This last point really irked me because it seemed as if the story could never quite figure out whether randomness or interconnectedness was more important to the total effect, and consequently the total effect seemed much more haphazard then I imagine it was meant to be. Add on top of that passages that accidentally change tense and case, which I would like to blame on the translation rather than the writing style. On the whole I felt that I was only getting half of what was supposed to be on the page.

Nonetheless this was a really wonderful read and points to all sorts of interesting directions for the use of fractured narratives, alternative histories, and perceptual irrealities that harken to the best of magical realist and post-modern literatures. I highly recommend this book and look forward to reading more of Murakami's work in the future.