Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is a good combination of the weirdness that turned me off his "A Wild Sheep Chase", and the transcendent beauty that had me gushing over his "Norwegian Wood". Thankfully, he's taken what didn't work in the former and made it work, and what did work in the latter and amplified it.

Our narrator here, an out of work lawyer named Toru Okada, bears a lot of resemblance to his "Norwegian Wood" namesake, Toru Watanabe. Both men are ciphers, devoid of any personality of their own. "No doubt about it: a whole day had gone by," Okada notes at one point. "But my one-day absence was probably not having an effect on anybody. Not one human being had noticed that I was gone, likely." This is how both Torus see themselves, only it was hardly true. Okada, like Watanabe, is adept at unwillingly attracting a menagerie of strange women to him. There's a pair of seemingly psychic sisters with silly names, an inquisitive and curious high-school girl who lives across the alley, and the mysterious woman who's always offering Okada a cigarette.

Most dominant of these women is Okada's wife, Kumiko. "Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?" Okada asks early on, articulating the novel's central question. It is Kumiko of which he is speaking here. She appears one morning wearing a strange new perfume. And then she disappears. The remainder of the book finds Okada searching for her, and the situations he gets himself into do a lot of work in answering his question in the negative. Take one example, in which he relates the story of how on their first date, Kumiko wanted to watch the jellyfish at the aquarium. Unfortunately, the jellyfish call up a bad memory for Okada: the time as a boy when he accidentally wandered into a school of jellyfish and got badly stung, making him violently him sick. The curious thing about this story is that he admits to never telling Kumiko any of this. Through his own actions he misrepresents himself to his wife, while paradoxically proclaiming her to be the one person who understands him. It is Kumiko herself who metaphorically answers his question, later on in the book, when she notes that, "Two-thirds of the earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see of it with the naked eye is the surface: the skin. We hardly know anything about what's underneath the skin."

Mirroring this idea, that we can't ever know another human being, Murakami's book presents itself as a confusing mixture of styles and time periods and points of view. While writing in a prose style that's comfortable for a reader to flow through, Murakami does a lot of work not letting the audience (nor Okada for that matter) see the machinations that are powering the story. To a passive reader, this can be quite disconcerting. The book is filled with tools to keep the reader off-balance: characters often tell long-winded stories, and abruptly cut themselves off in the middle for seemingly no reason; Okada asks countless questions of the people he believes to have the answers but never seems to get any; in fact, his questions are often ignored.

But a more discerning reader will revel in Murakami's post-modern detective techniques. Like Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy", "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is less about finding the answer, than about the labyrinthine path one must go through to even ask the questions. The story is: "A well without water. A bird that can't fly. An alley with no exit. And--" as Okada incompletely notes at one point. He is a narrator most put off balance, but more than willing to follow along on the adventure. "I felt as if I had become part of a badly written novel," he says. "That someone was taking me to task for being utterly unreal. And perhaps it was true." He is constantly recognizing that the little universe into which he's stepped has artificial rules. At times he becomes frustrated with the lack of cohesive explanations ("This reminded me of several so-called art films I had seen in college. Movies like that never explained what was going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films' 'reality'") but he never quits on the search. The audience, in order to enjoy this book, should follow Okada's lead in this regard. If they don't, Murakami's head games will confuse rather amuse, and annoyance will rule the day. If you're not ready for a book so aware of its reader that it helpfully title chapters 'No Good News in This Chapter' and 'A Place You Can Figure Out If You Think About It Really, Really Hard', then you're probably not ready for "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle".

If you are ready, then you'll encounter 600+ pages (it's long, but not *too* long) of simply but effectively written narrative (Jay Rubin's translation once again captures the tranquility-within-chaos that is a hallmark of Murakami's prose). One that's set in Japan but bears the cultural marks of American influence. One that jumps back and forth between the recent past and "prewar Manchuria, continental East Asia, and the short war of 1939 in Nomonhan." You'll encounter an interesting use of parallel motifs, where items or events that occur in the past or in a dream or on TV reveal themselves again in Okada's waking life. Here's a helpful hint: follow the bat, the dry well, and, of course, the wind-up bird, which "comes over by my place every day and goes 'Creeeak' in the neighbor's tree. But nobody's ever seen it."

Recommended: Yes