what i remember from the wind-up bird chronicle

I just finished reading Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and I wanted to record what it meant to me. The most direct scene for me was the zoo story, in which the Japanese soldiers were performing ridiculous, unpleasant, violent tasks based on absurd orders from unseen superiors. The world they were in was so beyond what their minds knew how to deal with that they were just murdering in a daze.

To me, the rest of the book had a bit of this theme as well. We live in an industrialized world where most of us don't have to directly work toward creating objects necessary for survival (e.g. food, shelter). So we have created this fairly absurd, alien structure of stuff to do. What we end up filling our days with is based on a lot of stuff we don't control -- the hand that is pointing us in some direction, winding us up, and letting us go. Case in point, I have spent the day performing regression analyses to determine whether fruit flies have souls (to put it loosely). So the absurdity is more exaggerated (maybe) in Mr. Wind-up Bird's dream-like world, but still he has various random tasks to do. Climb in this well, watch these people's faces, classify their baldness, ...

Mr. Wind-up Bird's world is maybe more benevolent, though, with there being some kind of order and final goal to everything. The world makes some/more sense to the narrator at the end, even if the means to the end don't. It's not necessarily a happy ending, but some kind of ending. So, I'm jealous of all the meaning in Mr. Wind-up Bird's world. He has some goal that is ultimately good, and he has people telling him how to get there, or he somehow knows how to make the right decision when he must. Of course, if I make a wrong decision and say, perform a quadratic regression when really a linear regression is the thing to do, I will not be brutally murdered by the imaginary, knife-wielding alter-ego of an evil politician out for world destruction, so maybe we're even.

I suppose, though, in the end, it is not the ends that are stressed in the book. Mr. Wind-up Bird and other characters cling to individual, vivid memories of peaceful moments (sometimes not so peaceful ... let's just say vivid ... and sometimes not exactly memories ...) to gain balance and stability in their world, and I suppose those are the most meaningful things for them. The characters make connections by sharing these structured moments with stumbled upon kindred souls. And these connections are real, substantial, and destined. It is all very weird. I'm not sure I get it.

Also, for some reason I've identified Noboru Wataya with Paul Krugman, I guess cuz they're both economists-turned-famed-politicians, so now I'm scared of Paul Krugman. Great. Okay, those are the thoughts I can think of for now.

PS I was listening to Dark Night of the Soul for the first time while reading this book, so the album evokes the book for me now, particularly the track "Revenge".