Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

WRITTEN BY

Jayesh Pandey

Chemical 3rd Year

ILLUSTRATED BY

Yash Bhardava

Mechanical 3rd Year

“When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is in darkness.” -Haruki Murakami, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Imagine you woke up on a warm sunny day, last night you went to bed with no plans for the next day - all you wanted to do was to half-doze on your couch as you binged F.R.I.E.N.D.S for the 20th time. But apparently, you cannot do that, because you are standing in the middle of a busy road. You don’t know how you got there, you can’t seem to recall a thread of memory that will untie the knot of this peculiar situation. You notice that your left hand is holding something. Your fist is clenched around a red-colored microphone - one that is used by news reporters. And on your right-hand something is scribbled. You are perplexed by this mystery, nothing is making sense anymore, your feet start moving on their own, you don’t know why you’re running but you don’t care anymore and you go along with the flow. You start sprinting, every time your feet hit the road the sound gets duller and duller. You are colliding with people, but they don’t seem to care. You are now running at your maximum capacity, but you feel no exhaustion. The sun was overhead a moment ago but now the sky is colored in orange as if Van Gogh was painting his next impression. You keep running until there’s no road ahead, until there’s no sky over your head, until there’s no “YOU” left.

This was a mere replica of the work of a true magician. And every show that this magician puts up has a formula to it - a whimsical premise followed by slow but fancy buildup which never concludes, with a tiny sprinkle of jazz - and although it’s formulaic, it works every single time. Because the whims of his idiosyncratic universe consist of - talking cats, permeable walks, ghosts of living people, and Colonel Sanders working as a pimp in the alleys of Japan. To say that these elements are absurd

would be an understatement, but that insane absurdity is the stronghold of our “magician”, who is none other than the Japanese author, Haruki Murakami. And his novel of 1997, Wind-up Bird Chronicle is no exception to his style.

The novel - Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (WUBC) opens with our protagonist, Toru Okada cooking “al dente” spaghetti while listening to Rossini’s Thieving Magpie on the radio. But the geodesic notes performed on radio and the flow of Toru’s life are soon disturbed because of the phone call and the peculiar chain of events that follow. These events lead Toru to cross paths with a number of fascinating characters, from the past and the present, and all of these people are connected by a single coordinate - Wind-Up Bird, a mysterious bird whose “clock-like” mechanical cry brings nothing but despair and ill-fate. The supernatural elements at play apropos the mystical tone of the novel, each chapter invites you into the woods of magic-realism, to get lost in for hours.

To say that WUBC is a complex but majestic novel would be a euphemism and this might sound like hyperbole, but this novel is very close to a meditative retreat - for one obvious reason, its metaphysical nature. The book deals with different fundamental levels of the human psyche by using Freudian Psychology of ID, Ego, and Superego. It combines themes like Nature of Reality, Relativity of Time, and the most evident - Mold of Darkness. Throughout the novel, you will find characters trying to come to terms with their inner darkness and the darkness that the environment has to offer, and within different prose, Murakami offers the readers a torch to find their own Light and Darkness.

It is always a wild-ride to see a Murakami novel unpeel its layers and in the end, the reader is left with an indescribable delight and tons of questions, as if they were the main character. And WUBC nails these aspects to the point that it won’t be an overstatement to say that WUBC is the most Murakamian novel. It will force you to leave every task hanging, while you gulp down the last word of the last sentence of the last page of this novel. In other words, it is a mesmerizing read that will fascinate you and linger in your memories like ink forged on vellum.