On The Wind-up Bird Chronicles, or the Nature of Reality
In Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicles, the theme of many worlds existing alongside one reality embodies several forms. In one, narrator Toru Okada is a newly unemployed househusband whose days revolve around trips to the grocery store and his wife, Kumiko, for whom he feels both affection and an awareness of her growing aloofness.
Book One or Book of the Thieving Magpie (泥棒かささぎ編, Dorobō kasasagi hen) opens with Toru searching for the couple’s newly missing cat, Noboru Wataya, named after Kumiko’s tyrannical brother. Strange omens appear as Toru leaves his old world behind. Once employed at a law firm, wearing suits every day and following a strict routine, Toru sees life for the first time as a non-conformist.
Toru’s pursuit of the cat leads him to an alley located behind an abandoned house. Kumiko mentions that she had spotted the cat there, hanging up before Toru can ask for details. The abandoned house is seen as a bad omen, most recently exemplified in a familicide. The home of May Kasahara, a teenage girl who was injured in a motorcycle accident and does not attend school, is also located there. The synonymously peppy and morose May, who fakes a limp to continue staying away from school, has more emotional than physical trauma from her accident. This trauma results in May’s fragmentation, which separates her from other children, giving her both a whimsical youthfulness and a detached cynicism. Toru, who is also removed from the world in which others of his general demographic inhabit, appears a puzzling enigma to May, and they develop an odd, if familial, kinship as unwitting occupants of this new world.
“Here’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara. “Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it very well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.”
“Crazy things?”
“Like, say, trapping you in a well, or like, when I’m riding on the back of a motorcycle, putting my hands over the eyes of the guy who’s driving.”
At the beginning of the second book, Book of the Prophesying Bird (予言する鳥編, Yogen suru tori hen), May enlists Toro, or “Mr. Wind-up Bird”, as she comes to call him, in accompanying her to the wig company, where she categorizes men on the street according to their level of baldness. With an unfitting level of enthusiasm, she ponders as to why the term “bald” is disliked just because it could symbolize deterioration and death. Through May, we see the embodiment of genuine contradictory elements, perhaps a demonstration of her two divided selves attempting to coexist.
In one way, May is delighted by “Mr. Wind-Up Bird” and desires his company as a fellow lost traveler. May’s subconscious operates from a place of being deeply occupied with questions of reality and purpose, whilst her conscious self is an energetic, innocent teenager, which can make her presence both unsettling and unreal. She incites morbid pontifications in a cheerful tone, following them gleefully with, “You know what I mean? Do you, Mr. Wind-up Bird?” Toru, both passive and amicable, as well as unattached to traditional notions of success, responds with a genuine indifference to May’s provocations, thus providing her with a sense of company for which she is starved due to her unattractive behavior.
“Anyway, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, no, I don’t feel as if I’ve been defiled. I just wanted to get close to that gooshy thing if I could. I wanted to trick it into coming out of me and then crush it to bits. You’ve got to really push the limits if you’re going to trick it into coming out. It’s the only way. You’ve got to offer it good bait.” She shook her head slowly. “No, I don’t think I’ve been defiled. But I haven’t been saved, either. There’s nobody who can save me right now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. The world looks totally empty to me. Everything I see around me looks fake. The only thing that isn’t fake is that gooshy thing inside me.”
A division of self occurred at a pivotal moment in both May and Toru’s lives. For May, it was the death of her motorcyclist boyfriend. She would periodically “prank” him by covering his eyes as they rode. Although it had not manifested in serious consequences before, this act ultimately led to his death, and May’s entrance into this “other” world, where she meets Toru. For Toru, it is the disappearance of the cat which he shares with Kumiko, which embodies the connection and contentment present in their marriage. Thus, Kumiko panics when the cat disappears, even enlisting an apparent psychic, Malta Kano, to help in his retrieval.
When our identity fragments, as the result of a physical or metaphysical injury, space opens, splitting what was once our whole self in two. In this space, we may develop something new: Empathy, the development of certain gifts, or perhaps, emptiness. In emptiness, what becomes possible? Do we stay in the “other world” forever? For Toru, he develops spiritual gifts. Murakami tends to bring physical manifestations to qualities of the unconscious and often uses the theme of sex as a key to transcending into these other worlds.
“Creta Kano then said, “Of course, we did not have relations in reality. When you ejaculated, it was not into me, physically, but in your own consciousness. Do you see? It was a fabricated consciousness. Still, the two of us share the consciousness of having had relations with each other.”
“What’s the point of doing something like that?”
“To know,” she said. “To know more — and more deeply.”
Arguably, Noburu Watya has chosen not to fill the space in his fragmented identity, and thus manifests the worst notions of the State, another preeminent theme in Murakami novels. We can draw parallels in the character of Boris the Manskinner, a Russian prisoner-turned-overlord introduced by the character Lieutenant Tokutaro Mamiya. Lieutenant Mamiya is introduced to Toru by way of the will of Mr. Honda, an elderly friend of Kumiko’s father to whom the two would pay regular visits. Lieutenant Mamiya provides a historical context for the identity struggles of Toru in his young life: As Toru grapples with a sense of identity in a world dominated by the ideologies of success and power as embodied in obedience to the State and devotion to the group-think mentality, he risks losing the core of his being.
Lieutenant Mamiya experienced a similar fraught listlessness after he witnessed a comrade skinned alive in the Kwangtung Army. He was further traumatized by being thrown into an empty well and vows to sacrifice his life after experiencing what he can only describe as “a light” that he failed to capture. However, Lieutenant Tokutaro Mamiya is unsuccessful despite volunteering for the most dangerous duties and even encountering Boris yet again, Lieutenant Mamiya survives to return to Japan, though he is filled with a deep emptiness. From this emptiness, he attempts to help Toru, from whom he senses a similarity.
Another character who not only has her self fragmented but, in fact, loses herself entirely, is Creta Kano. Following her physical and spiritual defilement by Noboru Wataya, Creta explains:
“I needed time to get used to my new self. What kind of a being was this self of mine? How did it function? What did it feel — and how? I had to grasp each of these things through experience, to memorize and stockpile them. Do you see what I am saying? Virtually everything inside me had spilled out and been lost. At the same time that I was entirely new, I was almost entirely empty. I had to fill in that blank, little by little. One by one, with my own hands. I had to make this thing I called ‘I’ — or, rather, make the things that constituted me.”
The dualities of Lieutenant Tokutaro Mamiya and Boris the Manskinner, as well as Toru Okada and Noboru Wataya, signify the duality of good and evil in the novel. Their existence may catalyze the reader to question as to if such characters as Boris and Noburu would exist without the larger state system which supported their rise to power. Both ruthless in their pursuit of power, caring nothing for others, and exhibiting no compassion, both characters align closely with the very worst values brought about by state governments. On the other hand, both Lieutenant Mamiya and Toru risk losing their status, reputations, and even their lives in pursuit of their “true selves.” Murakami artfully curates the physical manifestation of a portal between worlds in the concept of the well, which appears in both the stories of Toru and Lieutenant Mamiya.
In the final book, Book of the Bird-Catcher Man (鳥刺し男編, Torisashi otoko hen), we meet the two characters who ultimately lead to Toru to bringing Kumiko’s unconscious back to reality and to the world in which they both originated. Cinnamon, the daughter of fashion designer turned spiritual conduit Nutmeg, became split into two when he was a very young child. Since that time, he has never spoken. He has a kind presence and deep repose. The reader might ponder whether his inner world is, in fact, the “other” world to which the characters Toru and Kumiko briefly travel, as we gain evidence of that through Toru’s discovery of Cinnamon’s writing, “The Wind-up Bird Chronicles” on his computer.
Through these stories, we learn that Cinnamon’s grandfather, a veterinarian during the war, witnesses the execution of several Chinese prisoners. He describes himself as, “simultaneously the stabber and the stabbed. He could feel both the impact of the bayonet as it entered his victim’s body and the pain of having his internal organs slashed to bits.’” Murakami often uses the symbol of internal organs to signify the “true self,” as the Japanese believe the “self” is located in one’s belly. We can see another example of the “self” being taken when Cinnamon’s husband is not only murdered, but his internal organs are also removed.
When the core identity is removed, the conscious and the unconscious self have no means of communication. Thus, it becomes possible for insidious characters such as Noboru Wataya to harness them for evil purposes, as he does with Kumiko and Kreta. One also suspects, after hearing tales from Kumiko’s childhood, that his defilement of their sister was also what led to her suicide, or perhaps, that he had been the one to kill her.
Murakami uses the themes of loss and recovering from trauma frequently in his novels. Often, the narrator will experience desperate heartbreak for something that evades them, which will be followed by a metaphysical representation of the loss, and a search that leads to their fragmented identity becoming whole again.
