The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Poem

If there were one word to describe how The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle feels, it would be occhiolism. That sense of smallness of worth, a lack of presence. You begin at a road and make a choice to move. A fork appears. You descend into doubt. The stakes rise. Another choice – another fork. Thus the cycle continues, the road never ending and always splitting into innumerous crossroads, each with its own consequences waiting to collide with you the moment you look away. One thing is always certain: it is impossible to return from whence you’ve come. With each choice you obliterate the world you knew, looking forward, wondering if you took the right path after all… Then you reach the end. And you remember what it was you were looking for from the very beginning – why you chose the paths you chose – even if the answer was buried deep inside you, deep underground, and you could never see it… When it’s over, and there are no more paths, and the answers are right in front of you, and you feel safe for possibly the first time in a very long time – what then? There is still something left to do. There is still one more choice. They come, one supporting the other, an arm pulled over a shoulder, a hand tucked above a waist. The world lets them go again, but not as they were. …show more content…
As the story progresses, Okada only feels the powerful wave of insignificance, his fugacious gravity becoming known only to himself. There is, as Murakami allows us to notice, something so unique to this feeling- to a feeling like vulnerability. It is itself. There is no feeling to describe what vulnerability is, no words to make it understandable. It is, as I’ve come to realize, the most human emotion you can feel. There is something to the loneliness and fear that vulnerability brings that makes it one of my favorite and most appealing