We were in the mall last Sunday when I asked boyfie if we could pass by National Bookstore to browse the shelves for a while. I might be able to find an interesting book that would keep me preoccupied again in the next few days. But instead of accompanying me to the bookstore, he argued against buying me another book when he just gave me one recently. Ok now, to set things straight, "recently" was actually last May, and that was when he lovingly surprised me with A Wind-up Bird Chronicle, a novel by Haruki Murakami. Now the problem with "recently" is how to properly categorize it in terms of days or months. Will three months ago still qualify as "recently"? I answered boyfie, told him I finished reading his gift two months ago! His reply reminded me of my mother who used to quiz me about the books I read when I was a kid. Boyfie asked me what the story was about, that is, if it were true that I was done reading. And so, I write the book review below not to sound geeky but for the sole purpose of wooing boyfie to buy me another book to read. Please! =)
First of all, since Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author, I believe that there were some things lost in translation while reading the English version of the Wind-up Bird Chronicle. This book is over 600 pages long and took me a month to finish. Not only was it a lengthy novel, it was also a difficult book with so many metaphors to decipher, and so many sub-plots to stitch together. I will not feign intelligence and state with confidence the central theme that revolved in the story. Truth is, the story confused me. If I may boldly express my lowly opinion, I think that the novel had many loose ends that didn't have accurate resolutions up to the last pages. But then again, just as there are many ways to kill a bird (no pun intended), there are many ways to deal with the story of the Wind-up Bird also. And since I believe in flexibility (excuses!), I choose to focus on one of the more glaring main ideas that the story is trying to impart -- Hope.
Toru Okada, the main character, just lost three things in life -- his job, his cat and later on his wife. As he set out everyday in search of the missing essentials (with no intention to demean), he met several ladies each with her own eccentricities. Through constant dealings with these ladies, Toru comes to some sort of introspection and analyzes the life he led lately. He is brought to terms with his own insecurities. Being jobless and losing a wife who claims to have fallen in love with another man were both initially overbearing. And this is were the complexities in the story started. Burdened with problems, Toru becomes an unreliable narrator, mixing realities with his dreams and vice versa. But one thing was apparent. Throughout his rollercoaster problems, Toru kept one constant in his life, and that was his undying love for his wife.
Toru showed hints of positivism and hope in his ordeal. One subtle hint was when his cat unexpectedly found its way back home. He and his wife named this cat Noboru Wataya, after a man they abhorred. When the cat returned home, he immediately changed its name to Mackerel, the brand of a cat food. It was then just as soon as he decided to let go of his worn out tennis shoes that he wore everyday, and buy a new pair. He was now having a different perspective at his problems. A year passed by with no signs of his wife coming back, yet he carried on with his life and remained steadfast in getting his love back.
There were parallel tones of hope retold in Toru's friend named Lt. Mamiya, a former Japanese lieutenant who served during the Russia-Japan War in Manchuria in the 1900s. Lt. Mamiya witnessed a great deal of suffering from the Russians but believed in his heart that he could one day return to his homeland alive. In a lot of ways, Toru found strength in Mamiya's experiences during the war, and this urged him to go on believing that his wife will one day return.
In the course of finding a lost love, Toru slowly found himself along with his inadequacies and weaknesses. It was not an easy reacquaintance. He brought to the fore a mediocre guy who was in between jobs, and was dumped by a wife for a "better" man. At one point, I can say that he was becoming delusional which made me say he is unreliable. His dreams were mixing with reality. What he claimed to have seen may not have been so.
Will I recommend this book? Yes, if you are patient and fond of connect-the-dots game. There were some gray areas for me, and I couldn't really put the subplots in their right places. This book made me feel that I'm done with Haruki Murakami's surrealism for the meantime (I planned on getting Norwegian Wood). I'm moving on to the Twilight series of Stephanie Meyer. And with this humble and very honest review, I hope boyfie will find it in his very, very, very generous heart (and pocket) to buy me this four-book series. Yey! =)
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