The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami, 1994
An unemployed Tokyo househusband answers a stranger's phone call and finds his ordinary life starting to come apart.
Feels like unease, curiosity and longing. About identity, freedom and memory.
A page from the book
What four in the morning does to water, air, and books.
But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning. Haruki Murakami.Murakami ran a Tokyo jazz bar, Peter Cat, for seven years before writing full-time; his first novel began at his kitchen table.
Books that feel like this
More by Haruki Murakami
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami, 1987
A Tokyo student is pulled between a fragile girl from his past and a loud, alive girl in his present. Memory, desire, and grief, set to Beatles songs.
1Q84
Haruki Murakami, 2009
A Tokyo woman with a hidden trade, a maths teacher and a cult's story converge under two moons in a parallel 1984.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle like?
- Feels like unease, curiosity and longing. About identity, freedom and memory.
- What should I read after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle?
- If you liked The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, try Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk), Wicked (Gregory Maguire) and Tress of the Emerald Sea (Brandon Sanderson).
A taste of the feed
The night has no floor. There is only the sound of your own thoughts.
I come dragging in with every muscle bruised inside and out, but my heart’s still racing and my thoughts are a tornado in my head. This is insomnia. All night, your thoughts are on the air. All night long, you’re thinking: Am I asleep? Have I slept?
Fight Club · Chuck Palahniuk
What it costs to be the last person in the room still disagreeing.
The truth isn’t a thing of fact, or reason. It’s simply what everyone agrees on.
Wicked · Gregory Maguire
How much of your character is just a container you were poured into?
We want to imagine that people are consistent, steady, stable. We define who they are, create descriptions to lock them on a page, divide them up by their likes, talents, beliefs. Then we pretend some—perhaps most—are better than we are, because they stick to their definitions, while we never quite fit ours. Truth is, people are as fluid as time is. We adapt to our situation like water in a strangely shaped jug, though it might take us a little while to ooze into all the little nooks. Because we adapt, we sometimes don’t recognize how twisted, uncomfortable, or downright wrong the container is that we’ve been told to inhabit.
Tress of the Emerald Sea · Brandon Sanderson
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