ねじまき鳥クロニクル
1997
- literary fiction
- contemporary fantasy
- psychological fiction
- parapsychology
- fate and fatalism
- fiction
- japanese fiction
- man-woman relationships
- marriage
- missing persons
The story
Japan’s most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II. ([source][1]) [1]: http://www.harukimurakami.com/book/the-wind-up-bird-chronicle
What it’s like
Hot summer afternoons in a quiet Tokyo suburb, with the ceiling fan turning, a kitchen full of ordinary chores, and the slow hum of a neighbourhood gone still. The prose is plain and unhurried, almost conversational in translation, and it lingers on small domestic detail: pasta boiled for one, laundry hung out, a record put on while the narrator waits for the phone to ring. Strange events arrive without fuss, so the dreamlike and the everyday sit side by side in the same calm register. The mood is patient and faintly uneasy, a long, wandering dusk rather than a thriller's pulse, and the pacing is deliberately slow, with long digressions into memory and history. Its people are adrift, and the story follows a man slowly learning to sit alone with his own silence and to stop waiting for someone else to restore his life. Intensity is mixed: the domestic scenes are gentle, but there are frank sexual passages and a few brutal wartime flashbacks, including a graphic scene of violence at the Mongolian front. It suits readers who enjoy melancholy, dream logic and long reflective evenings, and it is best for those comfortable with an open, unresolved ending.
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