"Michiko Kakutani - On a Nightmarish Trek Through History's Web" - читать интересную книгу автора (Essays about Haruki Murakami)

Michiko Kakutani - On a Nightmarish Trek Through History's Web

Michiko Kakutani

On a Nightmarish Trek Through History's Web
October 31 1994, The New York Times Book Review THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE By Haruki Murakami.  611 pages. Alfred A. Knopf.     Haruki Murakami's latest novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, is a wildly ambitious book that not only recapitulates the themes, motifs and preoccupations of his earlier work, but also aspires to invest that material with weighty mythic and historical significance. But while Mr. Murakami seems to have tried to write a book with the esthetic heft and vision of, say, Don DeLillo's Underworld or Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, he is only intermittently successful. Wind-Up Bird has some powerful scenes of antic comedy and some shattering scenes of historical power, but such moments do not add up to a satisfying, fully fashioned novel. In trying to depict a fragmented, chaotic and ultimately unknowable world, Mr. Murakami has written a fragmentary and chaotic book.     Like so many of Mr. Murakami's previous stories, Wind-Up Bird is part detective story, part Bildungsroman, part fairy tale, part science-fiction-meets-Lewis Carroll. Like A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, it features a very ordinary man as its hero -- a passive, affectless sort of guy with a lowly job and even lower expectations. Like those earlier novels, it sends its hero off on a long, strange wild goose chase that turns into a sort of Kafkaesque nightmare.     The difference between Wind-Up Bird and Mr. Murakami's earlier books is that this volume not only limns its hero's efforts to achieve self-understanding, but also aspires to examine Japan's burden of historical guilt and place in a post-World War II world. The mechanical cry of the wind-up bird that the book's hero sporadically hears is the sound of history winding its spring, the setting into motion of events that will reverberate through public and private lives.     Wind-Up Bird apparently grew out of an earlier Murakami story called The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Woman (which can be found in the 1993 collection The Elephant Vanishes), and its origins perhaps explain the narrative's awkward construction, the impression it gives of being jerry-built out of an arbitrary accretion of episodes and digressions.     The central story concerns one Toru Okada, a gofer at a Tokyo law firm who has recently quit his job. Toru leaves his house one day to look for his missing cat and suddenly finds himself thrown into a series of bizarre adventures. Not long after the cat disappears, Toru's wife Kumiko vanishes as well, and he is forced to reassess the state of their marriage, even as he begins to try to find her.     In the meantime, Toru meets a series of curious people: May Kasahara, a troubled teen-ager who feels responsible for her boyfriend's death in a motorcycle accident; Malta Kano, a psychic who makes prophecies about Toru's missing cat; Malta's sister, Creta, who claims that she was raped by Kumiko's brother, Noboru Wataya; Lieutenant Mamiya, a soldier who says he witnessed a man being skinned alive; Nutmeg Akasaka, a mysterious healer whose husband was violently murdered; and Nutmeg's son, Cinnamon, a handsome young man who stopped talking when he was a boy.     Strange coincidences connect these people. We learn that Nutmeg's father, a veterinarian in Manchuria, has the same strange mark on his cheek as Toru. We learn that Toru and Creta have had a similar experience with prostitution. And we learn that various people who have heard the mysterious wind-up bird have come to unhappy ends.     Mr. Murakami uses these odd correspondences to build narrative tension, while at the same time manipulating his various subplots to raise a slew of other questions. What role does Kumiko's sinister brother, Noboru, have in her disappearance? Is Noboru's political career somehow connected to bloody events that occurred in Manchuria so many decades ago? And what is going on at the mysterious estate down the alley from Toru's house?     While Mr. Murakami teases the reader with the suggestion that the answers to these questions will complete his jigsaw-puzzle story, it turns out that he is equally intent on pelting the reader with portentous red herrings. No doubt he means to subvert the conventional detective story and, in doing so, suggest that the world is a mysterious place, that the lines between reality and fantasy are porous, that reason and logic are useless tools in an incomprehensible world.     In this, Mr. Murakami clearly succeeds, but for readers it's a Pyrrhic victory: for most of us, art is supposed to do something more than simply mirror the confusions of the world. Worse, Wind-Up Bird often seems so messy that its refusal of closure feels less like an artistic choice than simple laziness, a reluctance on the part of the author to run his manuscript through the typewriter (or computer) one last time.

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Michiko Kakutani - On a Nightmarish Trek Through History's Web

Michiko Kakutani

On a Nightmarish Trek Through History's Web
October 31 1994, The New York Times Book Review THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE By Haruki Murakami.  611 pages. Alfred A. Knopf.     Haruki Murakami's latest novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, is a wildly ambitious book that not only recapitulates the themes, motifs and preoccupations of his earlier work, but also aspires to invest that material with weighty mythic and historical significance. But while Mr. Murakami seems to have tried to write a book with the esthetic heft and vision of, say, Don DeLillo's Underworld or Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, he is only intermittently successful. Wind-Up Bird has some powerful scenes of antic comedy and some shattering scenes of historical power, but such moments do not add up to a satisfying, fully fashioned novel. In trying to depict a fragmented, chaotic and ultimately unknowable world, Mr. Murakami has written a fragmentary and chaotic book.     Like so many of Mr. Murakami's previous stories, Wind-Up Bird is part detective story, part Bildungsroman, part fairy tale, part science-fiction-meets-Lewis Carroll. Like A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, it features a very ordinary man as its hero -- a passive, affectless sort of guy with a lowly job and even lower expectations. Like those earlier novels, it sends its hero off on a long, strange wild goose chase that turns into a sort of Kafkaesque nightmare.     The difference between Wind-Up Bird and Mr. Murakami's earlier books is that this volume not only limns its hero's efforts to achieve self-understanding, but also aspires to examine Japan's burden of historical guilt and place in a post-World War II world. The mechanical cry of the wind-up bird that the book's hero sporadically hears is the sound of history winding its spring, the setting into motion of events that will reverberate through public and private lives.     Wind-Up Bird apparently grew out of an earlier Murakami story called The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Woman (which can be found in the 1993 collection The Elephant Vanishes), and its origins perhaps explain the narrative's awkward construction, the impression it gives of being jerry-built out of an arbitrary accretion of episodes and digressions.     The central story concerns one Toru Okada, a gofer at a Tokyo law firm who has recently quit his job. Toru leaves his house one day to look for his missing cat and suddenly finds himself thrown into a series of bizarre adventures. Not long after the cat disappears, Toru's wife Kumiko vanishes as well, and he is forced to reassess the state of their marriage, even as he begins to try to find her.     In the meantime, Toru meets a series of curious people: May Kasahara, a troubled teen-ager who feels responsible for her boyfriend's death in a motorcycle accident; Malta Kano, a psychic who makes prophecies about Toru's missing cat; Malta's sister, Creta, who claims that she was raped by Kumiko's brother, Noboru Wataya; Lieutenant Mamiya, a soldier who says he witnessed a man being skinned alive; Nutmeg Akasaka, a mysterious healer whose husband was violently murdered; and Nutmeg's son, Cinnamon, a handsome young man who stopped talking when he was a boy.     Strange coincidences connect these people. We learn that Nutmeg's father, a veterinarian in Manchuria, has the same strange mark on his cheek as Toru. We learn that Toru and Creta have had a similar experience with prostitution. And we learn that various people who have heard the mysterious wind-up bird have come to unhappy ends.     Mr. Murakami uses these odd correspondences to build narrative tension, while at the same time manipulating his various subplots to raise a slew of other questions. What role does Kumiko's sinister brother, Noboru, have in her disappearance? Is Noboru's political career somehow connected to bloody events that occurred in Manchuria so many decades ago? And what is going on at the mysterious estate down the alley from Toru's house?     While Mr. Murakami teases the reader with the suggestion that the answers to these questions will complete his jigsaw-puzzle story, it turns out that he is equally intent on pelting the reader with portentous red herrings. No doubt he means to subvert the conventional detective story and, in doing so, suggest that the world is a mysterious place, that the lines between reality and fantasy are porous, that reason and logic are useless tools in an incomprehensible world.     In this, Mr. Murakami clearly succeeds, but for readers it's a Pyrrhic victory: for most of us, art is supposed to do something more than simply mirror the confusions of the world. Worse, Wind-Up Bird often seems so messy that its refusal of closure feels less like an artistic choice than simple laziness, a reluctance on the part of the author to run his manuscript through the typewriter (or computer) one last time.

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