SOURCE: “The Mystery in Room 208,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 1, 1998, p. 22.

In the following review, Ferraro praises Murakami's narrative skills in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, particularly admiring the delineation of his fictional world and the persona of his hero.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the fourth of Haruki Murakami's novels to be translated into English. The first, A Wild Sheep Chase (translated in 1990), with its story of a man uncovering a right-wing corporate conspiracy in the course of pursuing a mutant sheep across Japan, created a distinctive imaginative world and established the persona of the Murakami hero: “Say there's an hourglass: the sand's about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.” The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle opens with Toru Okada, “Mr. Wind-Up bird,” doing what comes naturally to such people mid-morning—“boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with...