Over the past decade I’ve read and reread most of Haruki Murakami’s novels. Murakami is a magical realist. This means he builds worlds that seem based in reality but are skewed by abnormal or improbable events, people and phenomena. He blends reality with weird worlds of incomprehensibility and mystery, attributes deep significance to seemingly unimportant details, brings to life monsters in terrifying and ambiguous forms, and imbues seemingly aimless male protagonists with deep profundity. Whereas Odyssesus’ life and quest is characterized by purpose, the odyssey these characters are on is obscured or unknown until some catalyst causes a deep realization within them.
My favorite books by Murakami are Kafka on the Shore, A Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I admire the way he crafts the worlds in these novels. They hold a mirror up to ours but are off kilter to such a degree that they are more disturbing and unsettling than if they were dramatically different. IMHO, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle represents the best of Murakami’s work because the world he contains duality, reality and unreality--and features a compelling protagonist.
In the remainder of this blog I will take a deep dive into The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
This describes Toru well. Having run a gauntlet of sensory perception, having been constantly stimulated, and then attempting to escape into personal, domestic life, Toru has undergone a loss of identity, which a deprivation of stimuli or perception exposes. Part of this loss is the result of a self-imposed loneliness. He has consciously made an effort to cut himself off from the rest of the world. In fact, he has undergone privatization (a term from economic theory), or the process of becoming private, before the events of the novel have even begun. But the novel doesn’t let him off the hook; it pulls him into an alternative universe, off kilter, but hard to tell apart from reality. In many ways this is his subconscious mind, where he experiences all the intensity his conscious mind tries to block.
In fact most of what Toru experiences he experiences second-hand, or at a distance, as in the phone calls. And this is where Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the “simulacrum” becomes valuable. The idea of the simulacrum is that the original referent of something—let's say a man—is lost, absent, or repressed,and all that remains is the second order representation of that man—photographs of him, a video, a memory. In the simulacrum theory the repression of the man is to such a degree that he is functionally absent, lost to our imaginations.
These kinds of realizations in the Chronicle are hard earned for Toru Okada and for the reader. He only learns about the affair after his wife disappears, later sending him a letter of explanation. There are moments in the novel when Toru Okada’s, senses are not necessarily heightened, but they intensified. That is he feels intensely but he cannot translate his feelings into any comprehensible concept or notion. The results of this inability are the sensual dreams he experiences throughout the novel. This distinction is important because Toru Okada lives out a life of lowered sensory perception. This leads to a confusion in his life. His lowered perceptions are disrupted by spikes of heightened perception, and at other times deprivation.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle explores sensory perception and sensory deprivation in various manifestations of natural and artificial encounters. There is the sound of a ringing telephone, the absent touch where a lover used to linger, the innocuous chirping of birds outside the window of the house inherited from an uncle. There are also sensory deprivations, or fragments of the world that are no longer rich, but old, and absent of stimuli. The bottom of a well that a series of events has led Toru to descend represents this deprivation of perception. Then there is an artificial deprivation of perception as well—goggles that Toru paints black then straps over his eyes so that he can’t see… this is the world of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and of Toru Okada, the novel’s protagonist. It is this abundance and at times absence of perception that the lowered consciousness of the character Toru Okada encounters in his odyssey.
The world of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle combines Toru’s sensory perceptions, his conscious observations, with the subconscious impact they have on his psyche. Many of these impacts are realized in a dreamscape—that is they are very real experiences that the character lives out in a dream. Sex and sensuality are central elements to these dreamscapes. The nature of sex is that it heightens our sensory perceptions. In the novel this translates into moments of heightened consciousness. The protagonist Toru Okada experiences sex mostly in these vivid dreamscapes with mysterious partners. The opening scene is of Toru cooking spaghetti, listening to the London symphony, and receiving a phone call. He is ensconced in an environment of tailored sensory perception, unthreatening because it is of his own creation... In his dreams his sensory perceptions and his sexual encounters are intense, natural and uncontrollable. They reveal that he is in fact vulnerable to influence from stimuli—namely from other people—who have some sort of hacked access to his identity, his way of life, his psyche.
The transmittance of ideas and feelings through a blend of sensory perception and various levels of heightened or lowered consciousness is integral to the novel. The communication that happens is at first one-sided. We cannot be sure as to the intentions of the women in the novel toward Toru. We do soon realize after the first few chapters that through them most of the communication with the protagonist takes place. They are his connection to reality. Each woman interacts and communicates differently with or through Toru Okada. Depending on his state, they are successful to varying degrees. This is important because in many ways Toru Okada is a man without agency or a trajectory through life or through the novel, and so his relationships offer one way out of this dead end. Toru’s attempt to find a motivation for his life is a mysterious process. In fact, in the beginning of the novel he has little to no motivation at all. This is another key to the novel. The nebulous nature of modern Japanese society in the novel and Okada’s dismissive attitude toward it add together to create a sort of blocked energy within Okada; it makes it hard for him to relate to other people and communicate with them. The world of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a substance that the character moves through, full of stimuli, but Okada doesn’t engage with this world. His engagement with any social stimulus is mostly limited to experiences with his wife, at least until he enters the well and a variety of dream relationships.
Intertwined with sensory perception in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the concept of the simulacrum or the phenomena of an original referent of a second order representation becoming absent lost or repressed. The absence of Okada’s wife beginning in the middle of the novel signifies this. So does his relationship with the dream version of his wife. He is unaware that dream being is his wife, he forgets her name, and then the disappearance of his wife in reality intensifies this idea. The second order representation is the dream version of his wife. The original referent is his wife in reality. When she disappears, all that Okada is left with is a second order representation, or his dream wife. The fact that he forgets her name signifies that he has lost or repressed the original referent.
There is also an emphasis on the exchange of libidinal energies in this novel; however it is a dreamlike compulsion to sexuality, a limited outlook on lust, like the character’s limited prospects and therefore privatized life. Privatization thereby intensifies his communicative exchanges to hyper-normal significance. This is all a very complex seemingly subterranean exploration of the subconscious. Through his graphic depiction of the super normal environments that Toru Okada lives in, we are drawn in and put ill at ease when these familiar environments seem to take on a life of their own. This only increases throughout the novel until the atmospheres and the way Toru Okada moves through them evoke some sort of symbiotic relationship that is familiar and alien at once.
At the bottom of the well, under the influence of sensory deprivation and the dream world, Toru not only meets his wife’s mysterious doppelganger, but his nemesis, her brother, Noboru Wataya, who Toru has been at odds with ever since he asked him about marrying his sister. Noboru has since become a phenomenon in the academic, political world of Japan, where his sudden meteoric rise to fame is due to a textbook on economics that he writes. It is through the bottom of the well that is mentioned above as representative of sensory deprivation that Toru is able to access the sordid world that Noboru Wataya has constructed. It is a realm that represents his dominion over the minds of the sycophants that idolize him. Somehow Toru travels between reality and this realm by traversing some sort of veil that is only accessible through the bottom of the well where his senses are negated.
At the end of the novel Toru defeats the shadowy alter ego of Noboru Wataya in this realm, thereby freeing his wife from his defilement and unblocking the energy within himself that has been stifled throughout the entirety of the novel. Simultaneously in the real world Noboru Wataya becomes gravely ill and is put on life support, somehow unable to function without the world he has cultivated in the mirror world. A letter from Toru's wife arrives that explains why she disappeared.
What is most important though is that Toru, though he has lost the original referent of his wife, still cares for the simulacrum that she has become and is waiting for her trial to end. She pulled the life support on her brother in an attempt to cleanse the negative energy he instilled in the lives of those surrounding him. The novel closes with Toru heading back home from a visit with May Kasahara, one of the women characters who has given him guidance and played an important support role throughout the novel. He is going home to await the verdict of the court in the trial of his wife.
After running through a series of gauntlets relating to sensory deprivation and rejecting outside stimuli as harmful, Toru begins to accept that it is a balance, a communication between personal and societal stimuli that make life harmonious. He not only lost the original referent of his wife, but arguably for reality itself when he traversed the veil into the shadow realm. However, he is able to reconcile himself with the reality and come back into the world as a man who has agency, who knows he must live in the world even though it may not be the world he is familiar with and that he loves his wife even though she may not be the woman he fell in love with originally. He has matured into someone who accepts that he cannot simply cut himself off from the world and from others in order to find balance.
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| Wind Up Bird, illustration © by Danny PiG |
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a magical foray into alternate forms of perception and consciousness. Set in post-war Japan, the novel begins with an innocuous-seeming phone call that the protagonist Toru Okada assumes to be a prank, or a sales pitch. He almost doesn’t even answer it; he is cooking spaghetti, trying to get it just right—al dente. Slowly, inexorably, throughout the novel, as the calls continue, he realizes that they pertain to himself as he might be. Both Toru’s immersion in his mundane domestic life and these phone calls are essential to understanding Haruki Murakami’s work, which is about a man who seeks to escape from the outside world, to live a low-key life of private satisfactions, but who is summoned into a magical, subterranean world where his intense private feelings and subconscious desires are given expression.
One way to analyze Toru and his futile desire to escape from the outside world is to use concepts from Walter Benjamin. Walter Benjamin argued that the shock sensation is a central phenomenon of modernity. This can be described with the help of a formula: the sensation of shock leads to heightened consciousness, which creates pain, which create the desire to protect against the pain, which leads to the disintegration of what seems to make a person important or unique, otherwise known as his or her aura. In his essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Benjamin defines shock as over-stimulation. He quotes a sentence from Freud to do this that applies remarkably well to Toru. Freud says that “for a living organism, protection against stimuli is almost more of an important function than the reception of stimuli'".
Benjamin adds that Freud uses the idea of a "'protective shield'" that protects against shock, "'the excessive energies of the outside world'". The less our consciousness feels these shocks, the less likely we are to feel pain. Since the external world is constantly threatening to over-stimulate us, we build up defenses that help us block it out. Our consciousness is our shield against pain at the subconscious level. In his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin directly relates shock to modernity. He says that the flickering, speedy, always moving images of films makes it hard for the consciousness to make sense of them, since "the spectator's process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change". So a person’s conscious mind will often shut down rather than attempt to connect and make sense of them.
This describes Toru well. Having run a gauntlet of sensory perception, having been constantly stimulated, and then attempting to escape into personal, domestic life, Toru has undergone a loss of identity, which a deprivation of stimuli or perception exposes. Part of this loss is the result of a self-imposed loneliness. He has consciously made an effort to cut himself off from the rest of the world. In fact, he has undergone privatization (a term from economic theory), or the process of becoming private, before the events of the novel have even begun. But the novel doesn’t let him off the hook; it pulls him into an alternative universe, off kilter, but hard to tell apart from reality. In many ways this is his subconscious mind, where he experiences all the intensity his conscious mind tries to block.
As the novel opens Toru has lost his job, and his wife Kumiko is willingly supporting both of them. It turns out that the initial phone call is from a woman who wants she and Toru to “understand each other.” As the novel continues, we realize that this woman is a dream version of his wife, and she becomes a way for Toru to connect with other people, even though at the conscious level he appears uninterested in doing so. The novel emphasizes the desire of humanity to commune with others.
The female caller knows certain facts about Toru Okada, but he has no idea who she is. Her advances over the phone are sexual in nature. She demands exactly ten minutes for it. It seems like she needs 10 minutes exactly for some reason. It gives a clue, like many things in the novel, (though most remain ambiguous, much like the novel’s symbolism), to the reason for the call. It is almost like the police trying to track an elusive criminal. What could this woman want with a house husband? Whatever it is, it seems threatening to his way of life, and it seems dangerous for him to stay on the phone with her.
Here we have an example of external stimuli threatening the well-being of our character. The uniqueness of the novel lies in its treatment of Toru Okada’s isolation, even during ostensible communication. It is significant to the transmission, not of thought, but of the catalyst of thought, through the medium of the senses, to the core of the novel.
In fact most of what Toru experiences he experiences second-hand, or at a distance, as in the phone calls. And this is where Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the “simulacrum” becomes valuable. The idea of the simulacrum is that the original referent of something—let's say a man—is lost, absent, or repressed,and all that remains is the second order representation of that man—photographs of him, a video, a memory. In the simulacrum theory the repression of the man is to such a degree that he is functionally absent, lost to our imaginations.
What we are left with are second order representations. This is the way Jean Baudrillard puts it: “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real”. Consider the motif of the well in the novel. As the novel begins, Toru has quit his job, and ekes out a living on his savings and his wife’s salary. This is not to say that he is taking advantage of his wife. They coexist in a neutral atmosphere. His wife supports his decision to quit his job. If he isn’t happy doing it, she reasons, he should find something he likes to do. At one point she tells him: “It is your life. you should do what you want.” So he does. That is, he doesn’t do much of anything. He takes her advice but he doesn’t know what the next step is. He reads the want ads, but distractedly and without decision. His consciousness is lowered, but the intensity of his domestic existence is heightened.
In this scenario he is content, but he is not happy. Eventually, after a series of compelling events and clues, including his wife’s disappearance, he finds a deep well and lowers himself to its bottom. The well has drawn him in. There is an enveloping darkness that overwhelms his senses and lulls his perceptions. Under these conditions, Toru Okada traverses the substance between the physical world, or his perceived reality, to an alternate realm of spiritual garishness. Here, the simulacrum is the world itself. What the second order representation and the original referent are unclear at this point, and therefore the protagonist cannot fully operate with any confidence in his actions.
These kinds of realizations in the Chronicle are hard earned for Toru Okada and for the reader. He only learns about the affair after his wife disappears, later sending him a letter of explanation. There are moments in the novel when Toru Okada’s, senses are not necessarily heightened, but they intensified. That is he feels intensely but he cannot translate his feelings into any comprehensible concept or notion. The results of this inability are the sensual dreams he experiences throughout the novel. This distinction is important because Toru Okada lives out a life of lowered sensory perception. This leads to a confusion in his life. His lowered perceptions are disrupted by spikes of heightened perception, and at other times deprivation.
In this sense we as readers are involved in Murakami’s concentrated effort to explore the intricacies of a mundane domestic world upset by violent sexual and emotional experiences. Examining the intermittent affairs that Toru has with various mystery women in his mind, dreams, psyche and imagination, and the very real, passionate sexual affair that occurs midway through the novel, between Toru’s wife and another man, is key to understanding the underlying tension of the novel. Between Toru’s attempts to protect himself against the outside world and the shocks it delivers he finds the inevitable entanglement with other people that gives meaning to life. Toru’s difficulty is that despite the intensity of his private, personal emotions, Toru Okada has a diminished consciousness. This means he cannot translate his emotions into a functioning persona.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle explores sensory perception and sensory deprivation in various manifestations of natural and artificial encounters. There is the sound of a ringing telephone, the absent touch where a lover used to linger, the innocuous chirping of birds outside the window of the house inherited from an uncle. There are also sensory deprivations, or fragments of the world that are no longer rich, but old, and absent of stimuli. The bottom of a well that a series of events has led Toru to descend represents this deprivation of perception. Then there is an artificial deprivation of perception as well—goggles that Toru paints black then straps over his eyes so that he can’t see… this is the world of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and of Toru Okada, the novel’s protagonist. It is this abundance and at times absence of perception that the lowered consciousness of the character Toru Okada encounters in his odyssey.
The world of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle combines Toru’s sensory perceptions, his conscious observations, with the subconscious impact they have on his psyche. Many of these impacts are realized in a dreamscape—that is they are very real experiences that the character lives out in a dream. Sex and sensuality are central elements to these dreamscapes. The nature of sex is that it heightens our sensory perceptions. In the novel this translates into moments of heightened consciousness. The protagonist Toru Okada experiences sex mostly in these vivid dreamscapes with mysterious partners. The opening scene is of Toru cooking spaghetti, listening to the London symphony, and receiving a phone call. He is ensconced in an environment of tailored sensory perception, unthreatening because it is of his own creation... In his dreams his sensory perceptions and his sexual encounters are intense, natural and uncontrollable. They reveal that he is in fact vulnerable to influence from stimuli—namely from other people—who have some sort of hacked access to his identity, his way of life, his psyche.
The transmittance of ideas and feelings through a blend of sensory perception and various levels of heightened or lowered consciousness is integral to the novel. The communication that happens is at first one-sided. We cannot be sure as to the intentions of the women in the novel toward Toru. We do soon realize after the first few chapters that through them most of the communication with the protagonist takes place. They are his connection to reality. Each woman interacts and communicates differently with or through Toru Okada. Depending on his state, they are successful to varying degrees. This is important because in many ways Toru Okada is a man without agency or a trajectory through life or through the novel, and so his relationships offer one way out of this dead end. Toru’s attempt to find a motivation for his life is a mysterious process. In fact, in the beginning of the novel he has little to no motivation at all. This is another key to the novel. The nebulous nature of modern Japanese society in the novel and Okada’s dismissive attitude toward it add together to create a sort of blocked energy within Okada; it makes it hard for him to relate to other people and communicate with them. The world of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a substance that the character moves through, full of stimuli, but Okada doesn’t engage with this world. His engagement with any social stimulus is mostly limited to experiences with his wife, at least until he enters the well and a variety of dream relationships.
Intertwined with sensory perception in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the concept of the simulacrum or the phenomena of an original referent of a second order representation becoming absent lost or repressed. The absence of Okada’s wife beginning in the middle of the novel signifies this. So does his relationship with the dream version of his wife. He is unaware that dream being is his wife, he forgets her name, and then the disappearance of his wife in reality intensifies this idea. The second order representation is the dream version of his wife. The original referent is his wife in reality. When she disappears, all that Okada is left with is a second order representation, or his dream wife. The fact that he forgets her name signifies that he has lost or repressed the original referent.
This ties in with sensory perception because when his wife disappears, she leaves her presence behind in the house. The dream version of her is the manifestation of this presence. All of her clothes remain. She takes almost nothing with her. These artifacts remind Okada of some essence of his wife, but exactly what he cannot put his finger on. Toru Okada cannot differentiate between the original referent and the second order representation in his life. Therefore he is adrift in an ambiguous and imaginary relationship with the woman he is searching for. The result is a blocked energy within him, a lowered consciousness, and a gauntlet of haunting sensory perception that he traverses day to day, reminders and memories of his wife that keeps him stagnant.
There is also an emphasis on the exchange of libidinal energies in this novel; however it is a dreamlike compulsion to sexuality, a limited outlook on lust, like the character’s limited prospects and therefore privatized life. Privatization thereby intensifies his communicative exchanges to hyper-normal significance. This is all a very complex seemingly subterranean exploration of the subconscious. Through his graphic depiction of the super normal environments that Toru Okada lives in, we are drawn in and put ill at ease when these familiar environments seem to take on a life of their own. This only increases throughout the novel until the atmospheres and the way Toru Okada moves through them evoke some sort of symbiotic relationship that is familiar and alien at once.
At the bottom of the well, under the influence of sensory deprivation and the dream world, Toru not only meets his wife’s mysterious doppelganger, but his nemesis, her brother, Noboru Wataya, who Toru has been at odds with ever since he asked him about marrying his sister. Noboru has since become a phenomenon in the academic, political world of Japan, where his sudden meteoric rise to fame is due to a textbook on economics that he writes. It is through the bottom of the well that is mentioned above as representative of sensory deprivation that Toru is able to access the sordid world that Noboru Wataya has constructed. It is a realm that represents his dominion over the minds of the sycophants that idolize him. Somehow Toru travels between reality and this realm by traversing some sort of veil that is only accessible through the bottom of the well where his senses are negated.
At the end of the novel Toru defeats the shadowy alter ego of Noboru Wataya in this realm, thereby freeing his wife from his defilement and unblocking the energy within himself that has been stifled throughout the entirety of the novel. Simultaneously in the real world Noboru Wataya becomes gravely ill and is put on life support, somehow unable to function without the world he has cultivated in the mirror world. A letter from Toru's wife arrives that explains why she disappeared.
What is most important though is that Toru, though he has lost the original referent of his wife, still cares for the simulacrum that she has become and is waiting for her trial to end. She pulled the life support on her brother in an attempt to cleanse the negative energy he instilled in the lives of those surrounding him. The novel closes with Toru heading back home from a visit with May Kasahara, one of the women characters who has given him guidance and played an important support role throughout the novel. He is going home to await the verdict of the court in the trial of his wife.
After running through a series of gauntlets relating to sensory deprivation and rejecting outside stimuli as harmful, Toru begins to accept that it is a balance, a communication between personal and societal stimuli that make life harmonious. He not only lost the original referent of his wife, but arguably for reality itself when he traversed the veil into the shadow realm. However, he is able to reconcile himself with the reality and come back into the world as a man who has agency, who knows he must live in the world even though it may not be the world he is familiar with and that he loves his wife even though she may not be the woman he fell in love with originally. He has matured into someone who accepts that he cannot simply cut himself off from the world and from others in order to find balance.
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