Perhaps the most compelling of the subtales are those that travel back to prewar Japan. The accident, however, rather than killing her, ended up routing feeling altogether and Creta spends her days afterward living a life of aimlessness and prostitution. A young woman named Creta Kano, for instance, informs us that having at last given up on her life - a life of chronic, undiagnosable, physical pain - she resorted to suicide by car crash. The novel's effects arise not from its overarching plot, but from the splicing together of grim, sometimes fanciful narratives spun by tangential characters. It's as if, true, there are weird munchkins and monkeys that fly, but they're never explained by Dorothy's dreaming.

Like a sophisticated Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy never, in the end, returns to Auntie Em, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle recounts a series of imaginative encounters with only the most ephemeral connections to one another. In his fifth work to be translated into English, Murakami strings together moving and magical scenes in a novel that continually engrosses even as it eludes summation. The list for Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle would begin like this: a missing cat, an anonymous call, clairvoyants and domesticity, war, a fashion designer named Nutmeg and her son who doesn't speak, wet dreams, labor camps, toupees, Mongolia. Great novels often tempt me to enumerate characters and details, to compile one by one bits of a sensuous universe. The quickest route to a description might run: there's a colonel who loses every war, a well-hung son, the discovery of ice, and a woman who carries around bones. Some novels, for the purposes of retelling, elicit paraphrasing: detective tracks down killer who uses smallpox-like virus and computer tricks.

APA style: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.' Retrieved from

1997 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

MLA style: 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.' The Free Library.

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