Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Time certainly flies...  I started Haruki Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle a long while back.  Then I lost volume 2, and by the time I get back to it 5 years have passed.  So I re-read vol. 1, and finished it last week.

Murakami breaks with the practice in his previous stories (that I've read) of having an unnamed narrator.  It's not really a big deal, I guess, but it gave me an odd moment when his character suddenly introduced himself (around p. 50 or so, if memory serves).  On a weirder note, the character names are almost all in katakana, except in dialogue; I'm not quite sure why he does this, but it's got a weirdly distancing effect.

Overall, it's (so far) slightly less wacky than, say, Dance, Dance, Dance or Wild Sheep Chase.  The psychic stuff is played more seriously, and the last two chapters in the volume (where we here about the Japanese army in Mongolia during WWII) are the grimmest of his work that I've read.  Although it's not all entirely successful (the Russian officer feels like a villain in a bad movie), it's nice to see Murakami's expanded range.

And characters like May, the girl whom the narrator befriends, show that Murakami hasn't lost the ability (or desire) to write oddball characters.  The brief turn at doing surveys for a toupee manufacturer is a great break from the developing grimness.

I'm looking forward to finally moving on to volumes 2 & 3, now that I've got them all in one place.