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...because of Dellio's success that Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's The Windup Bird Chronicle, a hefty 611 page work of near genius, probably won't get the attention that it deserves. Although it spans a comparatively short six months in 1984, beginning with a Japanese thirty-something making a spaghetti breakfast to the beat of Rossini's "The Thieving Magpie," The Windup Bird Chronicle is a noirish, tragi-comic epic worthy of its own praise dictionary. From a bizarre story of the thirty-something's marital and spiritual crisis, Murakami's novel kaleidoscopes out into an exploration of post...

Author: By Brandon K. Walston, CONTRIBUTING WRITER | Title: Surreal 'Chronicle' Traces Search for Cat, Identity in Japan | 11/14/1997 | See Source »

...terms of timing, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle also beats Dellio in the premillennial funk literature sweepstakes. Although the English translation is just now reaching bookstores, Murakami's book was released a few years ago in his native Japan. Published in a three-part serialization, it is one of the most popular novels in recent Japanese literature. Critics have proclaimed Murakami, also the author of the much-lauded Dance Dance Dance and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the heir-apparent to the great Yukio Mishima (Decay of the Angel...

Author: By Brandon K. Walston, CONTRIBUTING WRITER | Title: Surreal 'Chronicle' Traces Search for Cat, Identity in Japan | 11/14/1997 | See Source »

...felt as if I had become part of a badly written novel, that someone was taking me to task for being utterly unreal," says Okada. While the story does has some surreal flashes, it is anything but unreal or badly written. Murakami's characters, though almost all off-kilter in some way, are never so ridiculous that they become unbelievable...

Author: By Brandon K. Walston, CONTRIBUTING WRITER | Title: Surreal 'Chronicle' Traces Search for Cat, Identity in Japan | 11/14/1997 | See Source »

...surreal life fades into waking dream (brilliantly translated into the latest vernacular by Jay Rubin), Murakami delivers a synoptic reading of all the ills of modern Japan, from crooked real estate deals to two-dimensional media men to a wonderfully true, Sprite-drinking 16-year-old girl who works in a rural wig factory. And as Okada floats through his planless days, he experiences every postmodern malady, from unwanted phone-sex calls to--the ultimate heartbreak--an E-mail "conversation" with his lost wife. These contemporary scenes of listlessness and drift are thrown into the strongest relief by gripping, graphic...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: BOOKS: TALES OF THE LIVING DEAD | 11/3/1997 | See Source »

...hollowed-out Japan whose motto might be, "I don't think, therefore I am." Again and again, characters say, "I was like a walking corpse" or "I was now a vacant house" or "I felt as if I had turned into a bowl of cold porridge." Murakami's storytelling ease and the pellucid, uncluttered backdrop he lays down allow moments to flare up memorably. Yet the overall effect of his grand but somewhat abstract novel is to give us X ray after X ray into the benumbed soul of a wannabe Prozac Nation...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: BOOKS: TALES OF THE LIVING DEAD | 11/3/1997 | See Source »

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