Reviews
Praise for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: "A labyrinth designed by a master, at once familiar and irresistibly strange."--Janice P. Nimura, San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle Murakami [is] some kind of wizard...The apparent simplicity of his expression... nearly disguises the fact that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is, in the most time-honored sense, an epic...Every character, every story, nearly every circumstantial detail, appears to connect with every other in some ectoplasmic cat's cradle."--Luc Sante, New York Mesmerizing...A major work...A love story one minute, a detective story the next, a psychological thriller, a New Age--ish bildungsroman, a sober chronicle of wartime atrocities, a meditation on historical guilt, and more, in dizzying succession...Murakami's most ambitious attempt yet to stuff all of modern Japan into a single fictional edifice." --Elizabeth Ward, Washington Post Book World A postwar successor [to] the Big Three of modern Japanese literature--Mishima, Kawabata, and Tanizaki...A cool forty-eight-year-old who once ran a jazz bar [and] has translated John Irving, Truman Capote, and Raymond Carver into Japanese, [Murakami] has been perfectly positioned to serve as the voice of hip, Westernized Japan...Yet none of his earlier books prepare one for his massive new Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which digs relentlessly into the buried secrets of Japan's recent past." --Pico Iyer, Time A bold and generous book...Straight-ahead storytelling [that] never loses its propulsive force...Western critics searching for parallels have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis, and Thomas Pynchon--a roster so ill assorted that Murakami may in fact be an original." --Jamie James, New York Times Book Review A beguiling sense of mystery suffuses The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and draws us irresistibly and ever deeper into the phantasmagoria of pain and memory... 'Every secret struggles to reveal itself,' Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote. That's exactly what happens [here], and that's precisely why the book is so compelling and ultimately so convincing." --Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review
