Windup Bird Chronicle

2/3 of the way through volume 2!  We get the second part of Crete Kano's story, in which Wataya somehow "defiled" her.  Even by Murakami's standards, this is pretty obscure.  It seems that, if anything, Wataya saved her from herself.  It'll be interesting to see how the defilement idea plays out over the rest of the novel.

Also obscure is the mark on the narrator's face.  It's clearly got a symbolic function, but I'm at a loss right now to know what it is.

Wind-up Bird Chronicle

About 1/3 of the way into vol. 2.  Toru realizes that his wife has been having an affair when she doesn't come home one night.  Her brother tells him it's because Toru is such a total waste of space -- he quit his job, has never really done anything with himself, and so on.  Toru gets defensive, but admits to himself that it's true.  So, to think things over, he goes down into a well to think things over.

This is one of the famous scenes from the novel, in the bit of reading I did about it before starting to read the book.  If nothing else, it's very emblematic of Murakami's style; rationally, there's no reason why Toru should go into the well.  In fact (as it turns out) it's a very stupid thing to do when he ends up stuck there.  But in the context of the novel, it feels like an understandable thing to do.

And we finally start to learn something about the relationship between Kumiko and Toru, as Toru has flashbacks to their getting together, her getting an abortion, and so on.  In this whole part of the book, Toru is finally less passive -- both in the present (yelling at his brother-in-law), and in the past (pursuing Kumiko, his reaction to the abortion).  We also learn about the darkness that even then was in Kumiko's character.

Overall, vol. 2 looks to be a lot more intense than vol. 1.

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.