SOURCE: A review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in Yale Review, Vol. 86, No. 1, 1998, pp. 167–74.

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.

The Far East brings out the best in some, the beast in others. Oddly, this observation holds true even for Far Easterners themselves. This season brings four fictional takes on East Asia, of widely varying merit: Yasunari Kawabata's The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories, Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, and Simon Elegant's A Floating Life.

The Kawabata collection is, unsurprisingly, superior. The first Japanese to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1968, Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) was among Japan's most important writers at a time when the country was producing great fiction...