The main character, in many ways, reminded me of the unnamed main character of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a book very much about identity and the total upheaval and destruction of that identity and its mundane existence, as well as the importance of dreams and imagination. What starts as a plot about an unemployed man looking for his lost cat while his wife is at work transforms into a very fight for the meaning of his existence. The main plot of the book is essentially about an ordinary man, Toru Okada, who thinks of himself and his marriage and his life in a certain mundane way, until everything unexpectedly comes undone and he finds himself facing divorce and a total upheaval of his existence. This was my fourth Murakami book, so I was well-conditioned to his style, but so far I've never read anything from him with this type of messy structure.
There is the usual wit and humor and "quirky" way of writing here, where Haruki Murakami looks at the most mundane aspects of life and finds something magical lurking beneath them. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a dense, sprawling book with a lot of side stories and digressions. I suppose if it fit any book, though, it would be this one. Sometimes I'd go an entire week without reading the book, which really bothered me, since I don't usually have such terrible reading habits.
I planned to get through in it about a month, but I happened to start it at a very busy, stressful time in my life, and consequently there were times where I could only get through a short chapter, skip a few days, read another short chapter, etc. Where to start? First of all, it took me over 3 and a half months to get through this book.
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