What I Am Reading: "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami

I try to read a Murakami novel every summer, and this one was perfectly adequate. It was a bit of a slow boil; but I was on board for the meandering period, and then the plot started to pick up at just the right time.

"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" was a slightly dreamlike story about a man dropping out of society after the mysterious disappearance of his wife. Over the course of several stages, he lucks into the orbit of different units of psychic families, and uses the tools at his disposal to retrieve his wife from the world she has disappeared into. I was surprised by how fluid the dramatis personae was: some characters' involvement peak around the middle of the book, and other characters replace them for the home stretch. One of these characters drawn back was the teenage manic pixie dream girl character; and my fears that the main character would have sex with her were not realized.

My favorite parts, because I am boring, were the flashbacks (both normal and psychic) to the era of Japanese control of Manchukuo; consisting of pre-war border probing with the Mongols and of the eventual Soviet overrun. Another fun surprise was the appearance of the sketchy underworld figure Ushikawa, who also appears in 1Q84. 

So anyway, this book was perfectly fine. I didn’t love it as much as some of Murakami’s other novels, but the plot came together well enough, and it didn’t let me down.