The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel

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		The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
		The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel

基本信息·出版社：Vintage Books
·页码：624 页
·出版日期：1998年09月
·ISBN：0679775439
·条形码：9780679775430
·版本：1st Vintage International Ed
·装帧：平装
·外文书名：发条鸟年代纪（村上春树著）

内容简介 在线阅读本书

Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.

In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat.  Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo.  As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.
作者简介 Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo.  The most recent of his many honors is the Yomiuri Literary Prize, whose previous recipients include Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe.  He is the author of the novels Dance, Dance, Dance, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and A Wild Sheep Chase, and of The Elephant Vanishes, a collection of stories.  His latest novel, South of the Border, West of the Sun, will be published by Knopf in 1999.  His work has been translated into fourteen languages.
媒体推荐 From Kirkus Reviews
Not merely a big book from the broadly respected Murakami (Dance Dance Dance, 1994, etc.), but a major work bringing signature themes of alienation, dislocation, and nameless fears through the saga of a gentle man forced to trade the familiar for the utterly unknown. Narrator Toru Okada quit his law-office job in Tokyo. Then he and his wife Kumiko lost their cat. Then Kumiko goes to work one day, and he never sees her again. The loss is overwhelming, but when two psychic sisters take an interest in Okada, to the point of entering his dreams, and a teenage neighbor shares with him her obsession with death, to the point of almost killing him, Okada realizes he's into something over his head. Of course, if he hadn't climbed into the dry well of a nearby vacant house, the teenager wouldn't have had a chance to get at him--and neither would he have had an out-of-body experience that left him with a bluish mark the size of a baby's palm on his cheek. And if he hadn't heard the chilling reminiscence of an old soldier who'd been thrown by his captors into a well in the Mongolian desert at the start of WW II, he never would have wanted to see for himself what a well-bottom was like. And if he hadn't married Kumiko, he wouldn't have the ire of her powerful, venomous brother now turned on him. And yet even so, suddenly, subtly, Okada's fortunes change: Brought through the mark on his cheek into an alliance with another team of psychics, this one mother and son, he acquires the vacant house and its well- -and moves deliberately toward a confrontation with the evil that took Kumiko away and all but destroyed him. On a canvas stretched from Manchuria to Malta, and with sound effects from strange birdcalls to sleigh bells in cyberspace, this is a fully mature, engrossing tale of individual and national destinies entwined. It will be hard to surpass. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
“Dreamlike and compelling. . . . Murakami is a genius.” –Chicago Tribune

“Mesmerizing. . . . Murakami’s most ambitious attempt yet to stuff all of modern Japan into a single fictional edifice.” –The Washington Post Book World

“A significant advance in Murakami’s art . . . a bold and generous book.” –The New York Times Book Review

“A stunning work of art . . .that bears no comparisons.” –New York Observer

“With The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami spreads his brilliant, fantastical wings and soars.” –Philadelphia Inquirer

“Seductive. . . . A labyrinth designed by a master, at once familiar and irresistibly strange.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“An epic . . . as sculpted and implacable as a bird by Brancusi.” –New York Magazine

“Mesmerizing, original . . . fascinating, daring, mysterious and profoundly rewarding.” –Baltimore Sun

“A beguiling sense of mystery suffuses The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and draws us irresistibly and ever deeper into the phantasmagoria of pain and memory. . . . Compelling [and] convincing.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Digs relentlessly into the buried secrets of Japan’s past . . . brilliantly translated into the latest vernacular.” –Pico Iyer, Time


编辑推荐 Amazon.com
Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.

Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Amazingly long, incredibly pricey, wildly experimental, often confusing but never boring, Murakami's most famous novel has been brought to audio life with extreme dedication: by Naxos, a company that regularly wins prizes, and by a reader with an uncommon combination of skills. Degas is already a Murakami veteran, having read the audio version of A Wild Sheep Chase (Naxos), and has worked on radio, stage and even cartoon voice (including Mr. Bean). He catches the constantly changing mental landscape of Murakami's fertile imagination—which moves from detective story to explicit sexual fantasy, heartbreaking Japanese WWII historical flashback, everyday details of married life (cooking, shopping and pet care) and even the occasional burst of satiric humor. Degas treats it all with the clarity and calmness of a very deep, very still pool. Certainly not for everyone's taste or budget, but anyone interested in this important author will find something to enlighten them. Available as a Vintage paperback (Reviews, Aug. 18. 1997). (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From Library Journal
Kumiko Okada has a satisfying career and comes from a wealthy family. Toru, her husband, is a lawyer. Little mars this young Tokyo couple's life other than the disappearance of their cat. From that minor event, however, their life together devolves into a confusing web of intrigue. Kumiko disappears, telling Toru not to look for her. Then a collection of mystics, clairvoyants, and healers enter Toru's life. Reeling, he begins to spend hours in meditation at the bottom of a dry well, becoming a healer of sorts, until his work brings him into conflict with Kumiko's powerful brother-in-law?a conflict cast in moral terms, with Kumiko's soul in the balance. This very long journey is much less magical than simply strained. There are detours into the history of Japan's occupation of Manchuria and accounts of Japanese prisoners' lives in Siberian coal mines. Though interesting in parts, taken as a whole, this latest from Murakami (Dance, Dance, Dance, LJ 1/94) labors diligently toward some larger message but fails in the attempt.?Paul E. Hutchison, Bellefonte, Pa.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


专业书评 The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams
Mr. Murakami's long and devious novel opens in a resolutely mundane way, with the narrator cooking spaghetti. The significant items in the ensuing phantasmagoria soon appear, however--a dry well, a house abandoned because of a series of tragedies, a so-called alley blocked at both ends, the statue of a bird looking sadly unable to fly, and the unidentified wind-up bird that creaks invisibly in a nearby tree. "Wind-up" can mean either an end or a preparation for action. Whether his target is Japan or the world, Mr. Murakami's work sums up a bad century and envisions an uncertain future. His protagonist is a harmless fellow who merely wants to recover his cat and his wife. The troubles, real and delusional, that he encounters can be seen as extravagant metaphors for every ill from personal isolation to mass murder. The novel is a deliberately confusing, illogical image of a confusing, illogical world. It is not easy reading, but it is never less than absorbing. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Entertainment Weekly
Toru Okada, the protagonist of this Japanese bildungsroman, is an utterly normal man to whom utterly abnormal things happen. As the book opens, he is a married thirtysomething lawyer ... when, in short order, his cat leaves him; an unknown woman calls up and offers phone sex; his wife, Kumiko, disappears; a pair of strange women named Malta and Creta start visiting .... Sound weird? It is. And it gets weirder." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The New York Times Book Review, Jamie James
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle does have its flaws, principally in its uneven design.... Yet what Murakami lacks in finesse is more than compensated by the brilliance of his invention. As it floats to its conclusion, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle includes an almost Joycean range of literary forms: flashbacks, dreams, letters, newspaper stories and transcripts of Internet chats. And no matter how fantastical the events it describes may be, the straight-ahead storytelling never loses its propulsive force. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From AudioFile
Toru Okada is a friendly, easy-going fellow, but his life is foundering. After quitting his job, he loses his cat, then his wife. Strange people pop inexplicably into his life, complicating his story with their own. Is it possible these mean something? Narrator Rupert Degas juggles this rich layering of stories into a kind of clarity, if not exactly meaning--though meaning is really what Toru and the reader are both after. With its continuously nonplussed tone, Degas's relaxed acceptance of the story's ambiguity plays right into Murakami's hand. Writer and narrator conspire thus to betray the reader's fondest hopes: easy answers! There are none, after all, but nothing is spoiled by this discovery. Instead, we have Murakami's most mature exploration of Japan's war-ravaged past meeting the present. P.E.F. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From Booklist
"Really, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, it's been a lot of fun being with you. No kidding. I mean, you're such a supernormal guy, but you do such unnormal things. . . . So hanging around you hasn't been boring in any way. . . . But tell you the truth, it's made me nervous too." The speaker is May Kasahara, a Japanese teenager who bears a strong resemblance to Holden Caulfield. She's speaking to Toru Okada, who lives down the street from May in Tokyo and to whom a series of very strange things has been happening. Her words could also stand as a response to this absolutely mesmerizing, befuddling, unaccountably brilliant novel. Murakami is one of Japan's most popular writers, but while his previously translated books have been well received critically in the U.S., they have yet to garner overwhelming popular acclaim. This one will receive plenty of attention, but it's hard to imagine it sharing best-seller slots with the likes of John Grisham. It's just too much book for that.

Just what kind of book is it? That's the befuddling part. Plot summary is nearly useless: Toru Okada loses his cat and then his wife. He devotes himself to finding the latter but spends much of his time in the bottom of a well, hoping to pass through the wall and into an alternate world where the secrets lie. Meanwhile, he encounters a series of ever more puzzling characters, including a World War II veteran who recounts the horrifying story of the battle of Nomonhan, during which thousands of Japanese died meaninglessly in conflict with Russians and Mongolians. This overwhelming tidal wave of story washes over Toru Okada, who absorbs each new revelation implacably, hoping but usually failing to make sense of it. Murakami is utterly at ease with multiple subjects, genres, and styles--surrealism, deadpan comedy, military history, detective fiction, love story. His canvas is as broad as twentieth-century Japan, his brush strokes imbued with the lines and colors of American pop culture. Oddly, it all holds together on the stoic shoulders of Toru Okada and his single-minded determination to reclaim the woman he loves no matter how absurd the world around her becomes. In the scary but never boring vastness of this novel, it's nice to find one buoy on the horizon we recognize. Bill Ott --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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