![]() ![]() ![]() Murakami says this reassessment began during the four years he spent at Princeton, writing "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." Besides giving him an impressive command of English, Murakami's sojourn in America had an emotional impact that he finds difficult to articulate even today, two years after his return to Japan. What's more remarkable is the novelist's recent rapprochement with Japan and his countrymen, culminating in the year he spent interviewing victims of the Aum cult's poison gas attack on a Tokyo subway in March 1995. Since Murakami doesn't hide his identification with his heroes, it's no surprise to learn that he has long felt like an odd man out in his native land, even among other writers. Toru Okada, the narrator of Murakami's latest opus, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," spends a good portion of the novel in luxuriant unemployment - cooking, reading, swimming and waiting for a series of peculiar characters to pop by and tell him their tragic stories. They're dreamy, brainy introverts, drunk on culture (high and pop), with a tendency to get mixed up with mysterious women and outlandish conspiracies. The heroes in Haruki Murakami's dazzling, addictive and rather strange novels ("A Wild SheepChase," "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World") don't fit the stereotype of conformist, work-obsessed Japanese men at all. ![]()
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