The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I have nearly finished reading the book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (less than 50 pages of the 609 remaining). In addition to making me miss the neighborhoods of Tokyo, I am stunned by Murakami’s ability to capture the haphazard uncertainty, displaced sense of reality, disjointed spontaneity and humanity’s disconnectedness boiling brain recipe of fate and free will in each of the character’s movements through a thick paste of internal monologues, which become a large part of the setting.

The characters forced me to examine demons churning around in my own glob of energy- subconscious and conditioned responses- and ask myself the question: How does my free will intertwine itself around the thick and viable vine of fate swinging me for a ride in the night sky?

All of these questions. And where was that damn cat, Noboru Wataya, for an entire year?

I want to write the screenplay for this book. If I had only one scene to compose, it would be Lieutenant Mamiya’s story. Mamiya is a World War II vet who tells Toru, the book’s hapless hero, of the atrocities he witnessed on the Mongolian front including the skinning of his companion from shoulder to groin.