Can I talk? I'll keep real quiet, and you don't have to answer. You can even fall asleep. I don't mind." of closure feels less like an artistic choice than simple laziness, a reluctance on the part of the author to run his manuscript through the typewriter (or computer) one last time. No visit to Tokyo would be complete without a walk around Shinjuku, the area where Toru goes to stare at people’s faces after the strange mark appears on his cheek. For days he sits outside the station and people watches. Eventually he moves on to “a small, tiled plaza outside a glass high-rise,” which is where he first meets Nutmeg. 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.

Toru Okada is thirty years old and leads an ordinary life with his wife Kumiko. However, a strange phone call marks the beginning of a series of unusual events that entirely change the existence of the young protagonist. Everyday life and the ordinary meet with the inexplicable. The plot loses importance, fogged by dense clouds of mystery, from which only the bizarre characters of Haruki Murakami emerge. We are in a dream, we perceive it as readers and the protagonist of the novel perceives it too: «I listened to the evening news on the radio for the first time in ages, but nothing special had been happening in the world. Some teenagers had been killed in an accident on the expressway when the driver of their car had failed in his attempt to pass another car and crashed into a wall. The branch manager and staff of a major bank were under police investigation in connection with an illegal loan they had made. A thirty-six-year-old housewife from Machida had been beaten to death with a hammer by a young man on the street. But these were all events from some other, distant world. The only thing happening in my world was the rain falling in the yard.»The dream state of Toru Okada will remind many readers the surrealism of David Lynch, the American director who loves to communicate through his films with scenes that disturb for their visual impact, rather than for the linearity of well understandable plots. Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really.More than reading a novel, I feel like I've lived the life of another, like when you wake up from a dream in which you played the part of a fearless hero, doing actions you never could have done. Look, I just can't write poetry-eyes open or closed. I've never done it, and I'm not going to start now." Haruki Murakami's latest novel, ``The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,'' is a wildly ambitious book that not only recapitulates the themes, motifs and preoccupations of his earlier work, but also aspires to invest that material with weighty mythic 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. the harder the squishy stuff gets, until you reach this tiny core. It's sooo tiny, like a tiny ball bearing, and really hard. It must be like that, don't you think?"

Toru Okada and his wife live in a house in Setagaya Ward. We know that “The house was pretty far from the nearest station on the Odakyu Line,” but this station is never named. Some likely candidates would be the neighborhoods of Umegaoka, Gotokuji or Kyodo. Gotokuji: A refurbished version of ‘The Alley’? I stood and glanced toward the house, where there was no sign of a human presence. The bay window reflected the glare of the western sun. I gave up waiting and crossed the lawn to the alley, returning home. I hadn't found the cat, but we had by way of garden plants were a few drab hydrangeas in one corner-and I don't like hydrangeas. There was a small stand of trees nearby, and from it you could hear the mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.” However, where in later books ( 1Q84, for example) the sex can be laughable and gratuitous, here it’s never awkward or off-putting, but an integral part of the story. In fact, it evolves cleanly into the concept of prostituting oneself, both physically and mentally. There’s Creta Kano’s tale, of course, but the theme goes far beyond this, exploring how any situation where you sacrifice something, even the 9-to-5 grind, involves a similar betrayal of oneself. Toru himself has tried to avoid this, but over the course of his adventures, he unwittingly finds himself having to compromise his lifestyle, eventually ending up in a very similar situation to Creta.In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , Toru and his 15-year-old neighbor May Kasahara work part-time in Ginza , surveying the baldness of the men they see walk by for a wig company. Aside from the Wako Building in front of which they work, other Ginza landmarks include the Sony Building, a multi-storied Sony showroom, the Mitsukoshi department store and the Kabukiza Theatre. Toru and May conducted their survey in front of the Wako Building Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? and rubber balls and tortoise dolls and little baseball bats. One garden had a basketball hoop, and another had fine lawn chairs surrounding a ceramic table. The white chairs were caked in dirt, as if they had not been used for some months The pigeon across the way must have stopped its cooing and gone off somewhere. I suddenly realized that a deep silence lay all around me.

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. summer clothing until I pulled them out that morning, the sharp smell of mothballs penetrating my nostrils.

In the meantime, Toru meets a series of curious people: May Kasahara, a troubled teen-ager who feels responsible for her boyfriend's death in a motorcycle accident; Malta Kano, a psychic who makes prophecies about Toru's missing cat; Malta's Maybe he was in debt. It was like they ran away-just cleared out one night. About a year ago, I think. Left the place to rot and breed cats. My mother's always complaining." True, but with my raise and occasional side jobs and our savings, we can get by OK if we're careful. There's no real emergency. Do you hate staying at home like this and doing housework? I mean, is this life so wrong for you?" The air was still. There were no sounds of any kind. The pigeon had long since disappeared. I kept thinking about the woman on the telephone. Did I really know her? There had been nothing remotely familiar about her voice or her manner of

The storytelling is great, and even if I had issues with some of the characters (okay, all of the female characters), they all managed to be consistently compelling. But I just couldn't get into this one. The story, while interesting, sort of meandered around and by the end, it seems to have forgotten where it was trying to go in the first place. Murakami starts plot points, presents us with new mysteries and characters, and then he gets distracted by something and forgets to resolve the stuff he told us would be important. I tried to start this review by summarizing the plot, but then I realized I couldn't. So that's probably not a good sign. She pointed toward the vacant house, where the stone bird still spread its wings, the tall goldenrod still caught the early-summer sun, and the pigeon went on with its monotonous cooing atop the TV antenna.Also in Shinjuku is the majestic Shinjuku Gyoen, or Imperial Garden. While it doesn’t play a large role in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Shinjuku Gyoen is where Toru and Kumiko went on one of their early dates. It’s a must-visit destination during your time in Tokyo. Shinjuku’s Imperial Gardens