SOURCE: “The Roads Not Taken,” in New Republic, Vol. 218, No. 19, May 11, 1998, pp. 49–52.

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

Fiction constantly concerns itself with the lives of others, with the lives that we are not living. But then someone is pictured as actually living them, and there remains a purer, more speculative possibility, which is the life that no one is living except as an act of the fearful or desiring imagination. Fully realized pictures of this second life are quite rare in fiction, for reasons that are perhaps not as self-evident as they would seem. Why (we could ask, grumbling and sturdily resisting fashion) would a world which is already fictional, already an alternative to what we think of as history, offer a picture of yet another alternative, except out of sheer artiness or a longing for complication, or a...