Inside Toru: An Analysis of Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" (Part 2)

Darkness, wetness, claustrophobia – three unpleasant elements that we usually associate with the water-well. The well, due to its mysterious and sinister status, has in the past featured prominently in popular Japanese culture, with perhaps the horror trilogy Ringu being the prime example. It plays a central role in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. The first page of my 1998 Harvill edition is ink-black with a white circle hovering in the top half, representing the perspective of one who sits at the bottom of a well and looks up. This is an ominous foreshadowing of what is to happen to Toru half-way through the novel.

In Book 2, Chapter 5, Toru descends to the bottom of the well on the Miyawaki property for the first time. The rationale behind this strange act is never clearly spelt out, but the reader would not be wrong to deduce from the circumstances in Toru’s life that he believes by spending some time in the well, his mind will find the peace that it desperately needs. What he finds in the dark, however, is a revelation of another kind. His memories, aided by the “strange sense of significance” of the darkness, take on a special power. They recall fragmentary images which are “mysteriously vivid in every detail,” to the point where Toru feels he can touch them. It is thus in this surrealistic vein that Toru begins to recall his first sexual experience with his wife Kumiko. He remembers that he sensed an emotional distance between him and Kumiko (“The body I was holding was nothing but a temporary substitute”), but he had put it down to her not having been intimate with a man before. Predictably, things did not have too smooth a progress after marriage. When Kumiko became pregnant (with Toru’s child?), the young and unprepared couple had to decide whether to keep the child. Kumiko ultimately opted for an abortion in Toru’s absence. These recollections clearly indicate to the reader that the emotional distance between Toru and Kumiko is what has caused the eventual dissolution of their marriage, and that her sudden, mysterious disappearance at the beginning of the novel is neither “sudden” nor “mysterious."

Before dawn, Toru has a dream that is not a dream but happens to “take the form of a dream.” In it, his brother-in-law and nemesis Noboru Wataya appears on a television screen and gives a speech that seems to direct itself at Toru: “The stupid ones … grope through the darkness, searching for the exit, and die before they are able to comprehend a single thing about the way of the world … They have nothing in their heads but garbage and rocks.” This incenses Toru, and he walks away, only to end up inexplicably in the same hotel room where he has previously had intercourse with Creta Kano in another dream. This time he finds himself with a nameless woman who promises him his wife will return to him if he discovers her name, and together they pass through a wall. When he opens his eyes, he has gone through the wall and is at the bottom of the well again.

The passing through of walls becomes a notable motif in the second half of the novel, where Toru collaborates with the mother-son team of Nutmeg and Cinnamon in a secret triumvirate to help cure the (psychological) illnesses of high-profile personalities. By this time Toru has bought the Miyawaki property along with the well. The threesome turns the house and the well into an operating base, with Toru acting as the “medium” who travels from the dark of the well to other "dimensions." His collaboration with Nutmeg and Cinnamon gives rise to another series of recollections, this time from Nutmeg’s perspective, of harrowing war-time experiences in Manchuria. Nutmeg’s tale contains some puzzling elements that seem connected to Toru’s present situation, reminding the reader of the other disturbing tale in the novel – Lt. Mamiya’s.

The reader should be sufficiently confounded at this juncture, and so is Toru himself. In Book 3, Chapter 27, Toru briefly sums up all the questions that have been haunting him and the reader: Why do national histories and individual fates seem to intertwine, and why is the mystery of this equation bearing so much weight on his personal life? Without being fully aware of it, the reader has arrived at the beating heart of the monster novel: There is no division possible between national histories and individual fates. The two are inextricably and irrevocably linked. The actions of a nation have a long-lasting effect on the psyche of the individual, and any attempt to forget or distort this truth always comes with a damnably high price. Toru has to undergo unimaginable pain to confront the demons and ghouls of the past, and the same fate awaits the nation (Japan, in this case) that has opportunely consigned its less than glorious past to oblivion.