The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
A long time ago now I picked up a DVD in Fopp… it’s called All About Lily Chou-Chou (in Japanese they call it “riri shushu”), which is a fairly surreal film about growing up as a teenager in Japan. I’d never heard of the film before, or the director, or anything about the film. It was purely the DVD box that made me pick it up and buy it. It’s a really light and heavily saturated green colour (of the rice paddies) with a boy wearing headphones and a CD player. It turned out to be a really great film which just goes to show that sometimes you can judge a film by its cover… or at least that just because a film has a good cover, doesn’t mean it’s going to be crap.
Anyway, at the same time I bought a book by Haruki Murakami called The Elephant Vanishes. Again, I’m not too sure why I chose this book. It had a nice cover, lots of black and white, and it was written by a Japanese guy. I like reading books about Japan. The DVD I watched and enjoyed, but I never got far with the book. It sat around on the little coffee table we had in our flat for quite a while. Occassionally I would pick it up and read a bunch of pages before getting bored.
Anyway, while I was somewhere in Laos I think I ran out of things to read. My Discworld novels were all finished and I was stuck in the middle of nowhere (literally) without anything else to read. So I picked up the Murakami book that I’d brought with me.
As it turns out, it’s not a single novel, but a collection of short stories. Some of them were utterly bizarre. One (the first, I think) was about a guy cooking spaghetti when he receives a phonecall from somebody that says he knows her. It’s all fairly odd stuff but I was pretty upset when the story came to an end. The rest of the stories were great too, though… a hungry couple randomly decide to go and raid a bakery in the middle of the night and the woman who can’t sleep.
The thing about his writing is that it’s so detailed. This would probably normally put me off but somehow he creates a scene and people perfectly… there is no doubt in your mind as to what they are like. That’s a pretty clever thing to be able to do, if you ask me. Interesting too… I didn’t really want to stop finding out about the people or the things they were doing. As I say, I was pretty annoyed with the spaghetti story because it ran out… I think this was because it was the first story and I hadn’t yet twigged that this wasn’t a single book, but a collection of short stories.
I’m not sure why but before I even picked up this book I had bought another one. In a second hand bookstore in Thailand (Chiang Mai, I think) I took in some Discworld books I’d finished and went out with a few more Discworld books and another book by Murakami… The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.
I’m reading it now. It’s pretty silly really because I’m only really reading it because I’ve run out of other things to read. Good things are hard work. They’re hard to get your teeth into, that’s what I find. If you gave me a choice between watching, say, Missing Impossible: III and a newly-discovered never-before-seen Akira Kurosawa film it would be quite an effort for me to go with Kurosawa over mindless action. I don’t know why… I guess it’s just easier. But chances are that when I finally did get around to watching Kurosawa’s film I’d enjoy it far more. It would have much more of an effect and I’d recommend it to people when I’d long forgotten about what happened in MI3.
I can’t put The Wind-up Bird down… it’s absolutely amazing. It’s got everything you could want from a book… it covers things I guess I would turn my nose up at normally… it goes into what can only be described as the metaphysical or paranormal while at the same time still being a “regular” book. It doesn’t claim to be sci-fi or anything like this. It’s just plain good and it’s been the first book in a long time that I just can’t put down. Each chapter I finish I just have to start reading the next, no matter how late it is or how early I should be getting up in the morning. They should hand this guy out instead on long haul flights instead of providing everybody with three or four newspapers that all say the same thing! That’d keep everybody entertained for sure.
I almost forgot to mention that the short spaghetti story was actually an extract from this book. So I’m learning a lot more about it all. I was pretty surprised when I first started reading. Woo! It’s good!
Tags: Media