This is not The Folio Society’s first foray into the world of Murakami. Some of his most celebrated works have already been published for their catalogue, comprising ‘Kafka on the Shore’ in 2021 and ‘Norwegian Wood’ in 2022. ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ represents the third title in the range, adding perhaps the author’s most well-known and celebrated work. Stylistically, the three novels have been produced in similar ways, including retaining Columbian artist Daniel Liévano as the illustrator for all three. This approach ensures that the titles look aesthetically sublime on your bookcase.

Often considered Murakami’s magnum opus, ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ finds the author in a rich vein of form. The novel is full of his trademark stylistic literary techniques. The mundane, ordinary world of failing marriages, missing pets and unemployment are combined with the magical and the surreal. The author guides the reader through a labyrinthine story populated with weird and wonderful characters.

The hero is Toru Okada, a man approaching early middle-age. Love is disappearing from his marriage at the same time as his cat (bizarrely named after his wife’s brother, whom Toru despises) has gone missing. Kumiko, his wife, suggests he use his time to find the cat, since Toru has jacked in his job as a lawyer’s assistant and has little to occupy himself. At night, searching for his cat, Toru meets teenager May Kasahara. She introduces him to an abandoned house that contains a deep, dry well that she sometimes sits in. The house, and the well contained within it, prove to be a safe space for Toru as well as a portal to his past. His destiny becomes inextricably linked to it.

Typically, for a Murakami novel, a neat synopsis is a tricky task to pull off. The inciting incident – the hunt for the missing cat – proves not to be integral to the book at all. Toru’s problems really start when Kumiko leaves him and disappears without trace a third of the way through. Throughout the non-linear plot, Toru has plenty of interesting experiences and meets all kinds of intriguing people from a would-be clairvoyant to a World War Two veteran who is full of stories about the conflict he saw. Few of these encounters logically connect different strands of the story. Rather, Murakami’s style is to meander through dream-like sequences, creating and maintaining atmosphere, which becomes more important than the events of the story. Throughout it, there is but a tenuous connection to reality.

Regularly considered one of the most significant living authors, Haruki Murakami is an author of international significance and acclaim whose works continue to demand attention and accrue loyal readers. There’s no doubt that ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ finds at writer at the height of his powers. For a relatively long book, the prose is counterintuitively fresh and tight.

How engrossed the reader becomes in the story will be a matter of taste. As a reader who tends to favour books with a strong protagonist and plot, ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ didn’t grab me with any sense of urgency. Toru Okada is, in common with other Murakami heroes, ineffectual. I find it hard to warm to a drifter. Neither he nor his promiscuous wife Kumiko is especially sympathetic. A few elements date the book. One is the transcription of the conversation that estranged husband and wife conduct over the internet using a chat function. It would have been cutting edge when the book was published, but as always, rapidly-developing technology roots the book within a five-year window. The other aspect is the somewhat gratuitous descriptions of Toru’s sexual experiences. Perhaps, in Japanese society at the tail end of the Twentieth Century, such descriptions may have been groundbreaking and liberating. In today’s more sensitive and reserved times, they feel too on the nose.

Despite a few reservations that stem from personal preference, I enjoyed experiencing ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ as a book that led me far from my comfort zone. The story is full of nuance and clever, intriguing ideas. It is a fine literary achievement that, especially for those who can orient themselves within Murakami’s chaotic realm of the imagination, rewards a close reading. Its power is in the story’s ability to keep re-inventing itself. Yet the third part ties up loose ends and satisfies readers – even if you’ve meandered so far off the beaten path you’ve forgotten where you started!

This luxurious hardback edition of Haruki Murakami’s ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ bound in blocked cloth is available exclusively from The Folio Society. It features single or double-page full-colour illustrations by Daniel Liévano that bring the text to life, and an introduction by the author himself.

Publisher: The Folio Society Publication date: 12th September 2023 Buy ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’

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Murakami’s work skirts into magic realism – where the real world has connections to the realm of the fantastical. The protagonist is fifteen year-old Kafka Tamura – or so he calls himself. When his father warns him of a prophecy that Kafka will kill his father and sleep with both his mother and sister – a fate even worse than that of the tragic Oedipus of Greek mythology – Kafka decides to run away from home. He packs a bag, takes a bus out of Tokyo and embarks on a quest to find his mother and sister. But being a bookish teenager, he winds up staying in a library in Takamatsu where his life becomes ever-stranger. Running concurrently with Kafka’s story is that of the elderly Satoru Nakata. We learn from his backstory and official US Army intelligence reports that, as a child, he was caught up in a strange incident in the forest that has marked him for life. Gradually, the two storylines merge.

Murakami’s novel is impressively imaginative, and is populated with rich and interesting characters. Kafka’s exploits are ably supported by Oshima, a transgender man who works in the library, and two versions (perhaps like Schrodinger’s cat) of Miss Saeki, who, it is revealed, recorded a popular song which is what the title of the book is named after. Nakata, on the other hand, is aided by a kind young truck driver called Hoshino who is happy to act as a sidekick to the old man.

Some of the events are, on first reading, inscrutable. Nakata, who can communicate with cats, is less than impressed when he encounters Johnnie Walker (who is described exactly like the emblem on the whisky bottles), and finds that he is a mass exterminator of cats, because he is hoping to make a flute from their souls. Hoshino, on the other hand, teams up with Colonel Sanders (of KFC fame) who leads him to the portal to an alternate reality from where he can make sense of his past. There is a sense of ironic detachment in the author’s prose that makes these passages amusing in parts.

The unusual nature of the storytelling means that ‘Kafka on the Shore’ isn’t a book that will resonate with everybody – if you prefer straightforward and tangible plots, then this is perhaps not the book for you. If, on the other hand, you enjoy the works of Salman Rushdie, or Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods’, then Murakami’s similar style of merging the mundane with the supernatural or even the divine may well prove captivating. Overall, I felt the narrative lacked the cogency of Rushdie and Gaiman’s works. I couldn’t shake the feeling that, although the author must have loosely mapped out where the story began and ended, he found the path between the two points as he was writing. That approach often leads to dead ends and too much extraneous detail of the type that would be cut by an author writing in the service of his or her plot. I also found the overtly sexual nature of the protagonist discomforting – after all, Kafka is still a minor. Telling the story from Kafka’s perspective, Murakami focuses on his sexual awakenings and physical body so often that it feel gratuitous at times.

Even if there are aspects of the story that leave readers cold or bewildered, ‘Kafka on the Shore’ is likely to be one of those novels that you end up thinking about or debating at length with others long after you read the final page. What it’s about is not necessarily what it’s about, but each reader will find his or her own meaning and draw their own conclusions. It is a clever, provocative and unpredictable read.

In the introduction to this beautifully-produced edition that celebrates the work of one of the world’s most popular and acclaimed living authors, Murakami explains how he came to choose the name ‘Kafka’ for his protagonist, and why he wanted to tell a story from the perspective of a fifteen year-old boy. The pages are enlivened by colour illustrations by Daniel Liévano that riff on the idea of the quantum world, where its rules and laws seem totally incompatible with our own, and which makes it so philosophically hard to determine what is ‘real’. They capture the essence of the multi-layered universe Murakami has created for his novel.

The Folio Society edition of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, translated by Philip Gabriel, including a new introduction by the author and illustrations by Daniel Liévano, is available exclusively from www.foliosociety.com.

Publisher: The Folio Society Publication date: September 2021

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