The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

"He’s the best-known Japanese writer right now and this book I would consider to be his opus. It’s a big sprawling book that deals with weighty subjects like the Second World War and Japan’s part in that. There is a horrifying section set when the Japanese had occupied Manchuria and the Chinese are approaching and it’s told from the point of view of a soldier who is told to kill all the animals in the zoo as the Chinese close in. It’s a harrowing tale of this Japanese soldier going round the cages killing these magnificent animals. Murakami is known for all his pop culture references and that’s part of the reason he’s loved here, but he wrote a book called The Elephant Vanishes and he uses a chapter of that as the first chapter of this book, but with the pop culture references ripped out. I think he’s saying – okay, I’m being serious now. Well, he’s so into American culture that I don’t relate in that way, but he does write in a way that’s very Japanese, very dispassionate and Zen-like and in that way I find it does say something about the Asian experience. But Japan and Korea have been diametrically opposed for a long time so I don’t feel any close kinship. The Japanese and Koreans are very different temperamentally. Koreans tend to be much more brash. They are closer to the Irish – we drink a lot and get into fights. A lot of people think of Koreans as the Asian Irish."

"Reading a Murakami novel can feel like setting out on a lonely journey through the deepest recesses of the human heart. It’s a disquieting experience, like wandering through a forest with no end in sight, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the deepest and densest of all those forests. The central themes of war and violence might seem far removed from my peaceful daily life, but the novel reminds me that the darker sides of humanity are really contiguous with my own existence."