Lately I’ve been interested in reading Haruki Murakami’s newest magnum opus 1Q84, but then I overheard someone who was already halfway through it, saying about the book, ‘All things being equal, I would rather be re-reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.’ So that’s what I did.
I heeded her warning and am re-reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the book many consider Murakami’s masterpiece.
And it’s only upon this second reading I have discovered that what on my first time through seemed merely a confusing and surpassingly strange story — the type of book only a Japanese writer could have written — was, the second time around, really a long and involved (not to mention, fascinating) metaphor for what a writer goes through in order to produce a novel. Continue reading
