Murakami’s complex metaphysical tale of self-reflection, betrayal, connections and synchronicity resonates with the weight of the Japanese psyche and twines over itself with skillful precision, but still leaves a stain of emptiness in its wake.

What we have is a series of elements: a wayward cat, a dull-as-dishwater–and inert–unemployed protagonist, an absconded wife, a brutal politician-economist-power-mad-brother-in-law, and a curious central fulcrum of 1930s Manchuria (or Manchukuo, as the Japanese puppet state was called).

Murakami leaves the connections as yours to plug in to each, though he does offer some occasional exposition. Meaning blinks in and out of characters’ lives, leaving them vacillating between banal nothingness (so effetely expressed as to make the reader want to slit their own wrists) and profound–if inscrutable–psychological journeys in which they make supernatural visits to hotels and witness the mass execution of zoo animals. All as Murakami tightens the laces connecting events seemingly discrete in content, time and geography.

There is something haunting and meaningless in the web of meaning spun in “Wind up Bird”. One is hard-pressed to forget that Toru Okada, the protagonist, is wholly unremarkable. His apathy runs deep and his days are mostly naps. The disappearance of his wife seems to be the central concern of the novel, but Okada never makes you believe in his loss more than as something to motivate the increasingly bizarre underworld he slips into.

The problem with this book is that, in the way that some of its characters lose their meaning, it left me feeling hollow. A kind of quiet madness. A creeping futility. There is such mundanity in Okada’s real world that without the awful, often viscerally violent things that happen to him and his orbiting co-characters, there would be no point in his existence. That is, Okada is saved by the terrible, magical things that happen to him–they’re better than the other, reality-based possibilities.

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