Haruki Murakami, part 4: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami. Photo credit: Kevin Trageser / Redux. Image source: The New Yorker

In this post series I am discussing three Haruki Murakami-related works:

• David Karashima's Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami (Soft Skull, 2020), an examination of the English-language publication of Murakami's books from his first novella through his international breakthrough The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995/1997).
• Jay Rubin's Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (Harvill, 2002/Vintage 2005), a survey of Murakami's life and work up through the publication of Umibe no Kafuka (Kafka on the Shore, 2002/2005).
• Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car (2021), the Academy-Award-winning film based on two Murakami short stories published in the collection Men Without Women (2014).

Cover design: Chip Kidd. Image source: Chip Kidd

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was written during Murakami's time as a visiting lecturer at Princeton University in the early 1990s. Perhaps distance invited reflection: it is the Murakami work that engages most directly with the legacy of Japan's imperial wars in Asia.

At the opening of the novel, the situation is familiar to readers of the short story "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women": the aimless (but this time not nameless) 30-year-old narrator Toru Okada is sent by his wife Kumiko in search of their missing cat, who disappeared more than a week ago. It will come as no surprise to the reader that the cat has a larger significance:

"I want you to understand one thing," said Kumiko. "That cat is very important to me. Or should I say to us. We found it the week after we got married. Together. You remember?" (p. 47)

That the symbol of their union has gone missing is a strong clue to the reader, if not to Toru, that his marriage of six years is in trouble. Additional clues include the new earrings his wife is wearing, along with the unfamiliar perfume she's dabbed behind her ears. And the strongest clue: after returning increasingly late from work for the past few weeks, one night Kumiko does not return home at all.

Now Toru is searching for both his cat and his wife. His wife had told him to be sure to search for the cat at a vacant house at the dead end of the alley that runs behind their home. (The metaphors are multiplying.) At that house he encounters a neighbor, the boldly curious and precociously provocative 16-year-old May Kasahara. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle continues the pattern in Murakami's fiction of the semi-autobiographical narrator seemingly being irresistible to women of all ages, including an anonymous phone-sex caller, an about-to-be-married colleague who worked at the same law firm, and the psychic Creta Kano. May voices a question the reader may also be entertaining: "Just how many women do you have hanging around you?" (p. 215).

In the yard of the vacant house May shows Toru a dry well (another metaphor, of course; wells and subterranean spaces recur throughout Murakami's fiction). After his wife disappears Toru descends to the bottom of the well to think things through. Sitting at the bottom of the well he falls asleep, and May pulls up the rope ladder, stranding him in darkness. Memories of his marriage, encounters with an alternate reality, connections with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and a dawning realization that his wife's brother is not only unlikeable but actively malign, will follow.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle includes elements familiar from previous Murakami works: it features a lone protagonist on a quest who crosses the barrier into an alternate reality and does battle with agents of evil in that world and this one. But the Manchuria sections show Murakami depicting the futility, waste, and horror of war with a descriptive power and moral complexity that he had rarely deployed before. The Manchuria sections portray a universe where all available choices are abhorrent, and yet choices still must be made.

The text was significantly shortened in its published U.S. version (just as Hard-Boiled Wonderland had been). Knopf had contracted for a 125,000 word novel. When translator Jay Rubin turned in a manuscript that was 290,000 words long (the book was published in three volumes in Japan), he was asked to cut. Rubin estimates that ultimately he removed about 25,000 words, requiring the rearrangement of some of the material.

Murakami's former editor at Kodansha, Elmer Luke, told David Karashima that "the prose—of the translation, that is—had no tightness, it was flabby, and the novel went on and on and on far too long. . .It should have been cut more" (p. 239). Even with Rubin's cuts the hardback is over 600 pages long. But Murakami's editor at Knopf, Gary Fisketjon, saw the novel as "a giant step forward. . .in terms of scale and scope and ambition" (Karashima, p. 232). [1]

The novel's length and structural complexity—it includes flashbacks/memories, events that happen in a dreamlike alternate reality, lengthy stories (which have their own flashbacks) told by several characters to the protagonist, as well as interpolated transcriptions of letters, a newspaper article and a computer chat session—did not daunt reviewers. With the exception of Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, the book received strong to glowing reviews, and garnered a readership for Murakami among other influential writers such as David Mitchell, Junot Diaz and Pico Iyer. The Japanese-American writer and critic Roland Kelts said of the novel,

"For anyone who'd read Murakami before, the book felt like the author had marshalled his talents and concentrated them into one dazzling performance. For readers new to Murakami, he was a portal to another universe, another way of looking at and experiencing both the isolation of urban anomie in Tokyo and the repressed, unprocessed memories of the war in Asia." (Quoted in Karashima, p. 234)

Sales of the hardback doubled in comparison to his earlier books, to 14,000. Even more importantly, his paperback backlist titles also surged. Fisketjon noted to Karashima that "each and every one of his books in Vintage paperback sold more copies year after year. . .This demonstrated that if a reader enjoyed his or her first Murakami, he or she would then read another and another, and introduce friends to his work, and then they would do the same. I can't overestimate how important this is, and how rare" (p. 233). Murakami's international success, so long sought by his translators and editors, was now established.

In writing this survey of Murakami's English-language translations from the first English Library titles through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I've drawn heavily on two works:

Image source: Soft Skull Press

David Karashima's Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami recounts the story of Murakami's first appearances in English translation. It features interviews with many of the main figures involved, with a particular focus on his first translator, Alfred Birnbaum, and the editor with whom Birnbaum worked closely, Elmer Luke. Karashima approaches his task journalistically. While this allows the actors in this story to speak for themselves, it also means that Karashima passes virtually no judgments of his own on the relative quality of the translations he covers or on Murakami's original work.

Image source: The Fictional Julie Koh

For judgments (almost always highly positive, verging on the uncritical) about Murakami's work, and comments (sometimes misguided) on the relative quality of translations, readers can turn to Jay Rubin's Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. Rubin offers a translator's perspective on the many issues involved in "carrying over" Murakami's work from Japanese to English. He also provides interpretive summaries of the books through Kafka on the Shore (2002/2005), and a valuable bibliography (now, of course, in need of updating).

Murakami in English, three decades on

My own re-encounter with Murakami's earlier fiction has left me with mixed feelings. When I first discovered him in my 20s through Alfred Birnbaum's translations, I was drawn to what I've described elsewhere as his "self-sufficient but emotionally incomplete protagonists, indifferent to or alienated from worldly measures of success, who find themselves unexpectedly thrust into the role of detective when they come into contact with a dreamlike alternate reality." I found his conversational prose style very readable (thanks to Birnbaum) and the alternate worlds he created brilliantly imaginative at times. He became one of my favorite contemporary writers, and I eagerly anticipated each new release.

Three decades later, I still perceive all those strengths; at the same time, I now find that the symbolism can be heavy-handed, the moral lessons banal, and the available roles for women often limited. The novels can also be contradictory; as an example, while they critique consumerism, they also celebrate it: brand names, especially of high-end stereo equipment and imported whiskey, are often specified. And my responses have also been complicated by the disappointments of some of his later novels, particularly the 900-page behemoth 1Q84 (2008-10/2011) and his next novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013/2014). 

Colorless Tsukuru is, and may remain, the last Murakami novel I've read. I confess that despite the allusion in its title to Mozart and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni, I haven't been tempted to read Killing Commendatore (2018), and I also doubt that I will pick up the forthcoming The City and Its Uncertain Walls. "Lately I've begun to wonder," I wrote in my post on Colorless Tsukuru, "whether I wasn't really a fan of his early translator, Alfred Birnbaum." It's a question which may not be resolvable.

Murakami on film

Murakami has long attracted filmmakers. The first film adaptation of his fiction, Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the Wind Sing), came out as early as 1982. Seven additional feature films, eight short films and a TV series episode based on various short stories and novels have followed. As a coda to this series, in my next post I will look a recent feature film adapted from Murakami's short stories.

Next time: Film adaptation: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car (2021)

Other posts in this series:

• The English Library novels: Hear the Wind Sing (1979/1987), Pinball, 1973 (1980/1985), and Norwegian Wood (1987/1989)
• The first U.S. publications: A Wild Sheep Chase (1982/1989) and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985/1991)
• The transition: The Elephant Vanishes (1980-91/1993) and Dance Dance Dance (1988/1994)
• Comics adaptation: Jean-Christophe Deveney and PMGL's Haruki Murakami: Manga Stories (2021/2023)

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1. Also published within a year or so of Murakami's novel: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (Little, Brown, 1996), Don DeLillo's Underworld (Scribner, 1997), and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (Holt, 1997), all of which were even longer than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Big books (by men, at least) were in fashion.