Murakami Haruki is an important figure in contemporary Japanese letters for his extensive translations from American fiction, and the enormous popularity of his own fiction has drawn attention to his work as a translator. His translation work has also de...

Some novels, for the purposes of retelling, elicit paraphrasing: detective tracks down killer who uses smallpox-like virus and computer tricks.... Some, however, evoke lists. Take One Hundred Years of Solitude. The quickest route to a description might run: there's a colonel who loses...

Published half a century after the end of Japan's fifteen-year war that began with the seizure of Manchuria in 1931, the voluminous narrative (1,156 pages in three volumes in Japanese) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle probes the meaning of time, memory, and self-actualization in...

AFTER DARKBy Haruki Murakami Alfred A. Knopf, 191 pages, $22.95 Haruki Murakami works wonders with daytime. In the Japanese novelist’s very best books—Dance Dance Dance (1988) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)—un- or semi-employed protagonists discover that, when the rest of us are stuck at...

In the following review, Wood examines the metafictional themes of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

In the following excerpt, Cameron finds The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to be ambitious in its scope and skillfully crafted in its style, but ultimately decides that the novel (“a bad good book”) is a failure.

In the following review, Hower assesses Murakami's accomplishment in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, offering thematic and character analyses.

In Haruki Murakami's novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the cultural values of the characters and their ways are somewhat unreal and outside of the Japanese culture.