Inside Toru: An Analysis of Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" (Part 1)

Like every major author's tour-de-force, Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a sprawling, all-encompassing literary heavyweight. It is also something of an all-consuming black hole, a Pandora's Box that can unleash a darkness no reader has encountered before in literature. To claim that one has understood everything contained within its six-hundred pages would be conceit. This is therefore my bungling attempt, written in two parts, to make sense of a world where no sense is supposed to exist. To facilitate my writing, no summaries of the book's convoluted plot will be provided. For these, please refer to the almighty Wikipedia, or better still, pick up a copy of the book.

For the purpose of delivering an organised discussion, three recurring factors in the book will be considered: (1) The mysterious appearances of supporting characters, (2) the symbolism of the well, and (3) the phenomenon of pain. At times it is inevitable that these three factors will be discussed simultaneously.

Throughout the book we are introduced to strange characters who invade Toru Okada's life and insist on telling him their life stories. They are May Kasahara (the teenage neighbour), Lieutenant Mamiya (friend of Toru's wife's psychic Mr Honda), Malta and Creta Kano (sisters), and Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka (mother and son). Only May and Lt. Mamiya will be discussed at this point.

The most persistently present of all the characters above is May Kasahara, who carries out long, quasi-philosophical conversations about life and death in a disturbingly light tone with Toru. In the third half of the book, she is absent physically but continues to converse with Toru through letters. She is also the most cryptic of all the characters, despite her being a teenager and constant presence. This is because it is never made clear to the reader WHY May suddenly appears in Toru's life. She simply approaches him when he is out looking for his lost cat, and from then on, she leads him from conversation to conversation, forcing him to confront issues he does not want to think of. "I sometimes wonder what it must feel like to die little by little over a longer period of time," she says to Toru, whom she nicknames "Mr Wind-up Bird" because of his account of hearing such a bird in his garden. When Toru says he would not want to die that way, she tells him that is what life is: "We're slowly dying, little by little."

She is also the one who introduces Toru to the main symbol of the book: the well. In Book 2, Chapter 9, we find Toru at the bottom of the well. May sees him but decides, to his horror, to close the well cover over him. She says it is to help him concentrate on his thoughts better. He thinks it is a joke initially, but when May refuses to help him out, he knows that his life is in her hands.

May could be seen as a catalyst. She is the external force that ejects Toru from over-complacency and thrusts him into the mad whirlpool of life's cruelties. Toru does not see that he has been leading an apathetic life, but May does. By trapping him in the well, she is compelling him to face starvation, physical pain and mortality. May's character is a puzzle in itself, and she often asks questions which Toru cannot answer. This is precisely her role: the provocateur.

Lt. Mamiya only appears once, but his stay is three chapters long. These chapters (Book 1, Chapters 11-13) are by far the most nauseating part of the book. Lt. Mamiya, whom Toru has never met, has come to visit him with the intention of passing on to him a gift Mr Honda left behind when he died. When he is in Toru's house, he embarks on a long story about his wartime experiences as an officer in the Japanese-occupied Manchukuo. To cut a long story short, his team was ambushed one night by Mongolian and Russian soldiers, and he was forced to witness the skinning of a fellow officer. He himself was spared - for unclear reasons - but was dumped into a well and had to spend days down there before he was rescued.

The experience, needless to say, scarred him for life, and he still wonders to this day why he was the one who was spared (the circumstances under which he was rescued from the well were puzzling). Before Book 1 ends, Lt. Mamiya arrives at the point of his horrific story: that ever since he has never been able to lead an ordinary life. "There was nothing left for me. I felt truly empty, and knew that I should not have come back there," confesses he. He has never married, has no family relations left. He describes his life as an "empty shell". He says, "Living in an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on."

There is more than one coincidental similarity between Lt. Mamiya and Toru. Both of them are alone and lost, and they both spend some time in a well, experiencing immense pain (though Toru's well experience will only begin in the following book).  Lt. Mamiya's role is almost identical to that of May's, in that his appearance drives Toru to reflect on the current status of his life. One suspects that if Toru continues the way he does, his life will be just like Lt. Mamiya's - an empty shell.

Link to Part 2: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/01/inside-toru-analysis-of-haruki_11.html