The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Essay

People have always strived to explain the unexplainable. The Ancient Greeks were mystified by the rising and setting of the sun so they created a myth to explain it; Helios, the sun god, rode, “a golden chariot which brought the sun across the skies each day” (Cartwright). Toru Okada, Haruki Murakami’s protagonist in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, finds his life in upheaval: after having a mid-life crisis and quitting his job, both his cat and wife disappear and in their place, more and more intriguing people enter his day-to-day business. Just as the Greeks created myths to make meaning, Murakami morphs the once literal thoughts of Toru to a stream of consciousness littered with figurative language in hopes of giving Toru a better grasp on the strange occurrences around him. As the book opens, Toru spends his time settling into a life out of …show more content…
His only worries are of the missing cat and ensuring he irons his clothes in, “twelve precise stages” (Murakami 6), bordering on obsessive compulsive behavior, just as he counts the number of times the phone rings. Toru rarely thinks metaphorically during this part of his life, but that changes when Kumiko, his wife of six years, leaves for work one day and never returns. Toru is not the most observant of husbands— when left to his own devices he buys the wrong type of toilet paper and cooks a dinner that Kumiko cannot stomach— but he cannot comprehend why Kumiko has left him. This marks Toru’s first dip into figurative language. Suddenly cut off from one of his only companions, all his attempts to speak to his wife now stem through her brother, Noboru Wataya. Toru, who usually remains levelheaded and emotionless when it comes to opinions on people, detests his brother-in-law. As Toru falls deeper and deeper into jobless oblivion, Wataya climbs the political ladder. The protagonist voices his frustration, “It was like boxing with a ghost: your punches just swished through the air” and later admits, “It would leave