The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Study Guide

Haruki Murakami was the only child of two parents who both had a love for literature. Murakami’s father was a soldier in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and this experience had a great impact on both his father and Murakami himself, with its influence appearing throughout Murakami’s fiction, and particularly in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Murakami grew up reading a great deal of Western literature, and his works are noted for their Western influence. Murakami studied drama in college and worked odd jobs before he decided to start writing professionally at the age of 29. Murakami’s first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, was released in 1979 and received considerable positive reception. It was the first book in Murakami’s “Trilogy of the Rat,” which is a thematic trilogy rather than narrative one. Murakami quickly followed up his debut with the trilogy’s second and third books: Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase. By this point, Murakami was a well-established figure in Japan, but his works were not yet known to the rest of the world. This all changed with the 1987 publication of his novel Norwegian Wood, which received universal acclaim and was translated into English in 1989. In the decades following the publication of Norwegian Wood, Murakami would go on to release some of the most important works in world literature, including The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in 1994–995 and Kafka on the Shore in 2002. Murakami’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, was released in Japan in April 2023, though it does not yet have an English translation.

Between 1919 and 1945, the Japanese formed a military unit known as the Kwantung Army, which functioned as the army for Imperial Japan during this period. Several major characters in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, including Mr. Honda and Mamiya, served in the Kwantung Army during the Nomonhan Incident and the Manchukuo-Russian conflict during World War II. The Nomonhan Incident was the decisive battle in a series of conflicts known as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol, which took their name from the river that ran through the battlefield. These conflicts took place between the Kwantung Army and a mix of Soviet and Mongolian forces. These conflicts never turned into an all-out war between the respective forces, but the conflicts nonetheless resulted in many casualties, with current estimates suggesting that up to 45,000 people were killed in these battles. A few years later, at the onset of the World War II, the Japanese allied themselves with Axis powers, which continued the antagonistic relationship between Japan and the Soviet Union. During World War II, around three million Japanese men and women were killed. Notably, Japan lost and surrendered to the Allied Powers approximately one month after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Haruki Murakami is known for the wide range of influences that show up in his works, and he draws from both Japanese and Western authors. His Japanese influences include Kenzaburō Ōe and Yukio Mishima. Ōe is a postwar writer whose common themes included the fallout of World War II and existentialism. His most famous works include A Personal Matter and The Silent Cry. Notably, Ōe won the Novel Prize in Literature in 1994, making him a mainstay in both Japanese and world literature. Mishima, meanwhile, was a more controversial figure in Japanese literature because of his alignment with fascistic politics. However, he shares with Murakami an interest in fusing Western literature and eroticism. His most famous writings include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, as well as the autobiographical essay Sun and Steel.  Meanwhile, Murakami’s most notable Western influences are Raymond Chandler and  Franz Kafka. Chandler is best known for his detective novels featuring detective Philip Marlowe, such as The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. His novels tend to have loose plots and anti-climactic endings despite being works of detective fiction, qualities that appear in Murakami’s novels as well, and especially The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Kafka, on the other hand, wrote surreal novels and short stories, which featured themes of existentialism and social alienation. His most famous works are The Metamorphosis and The Trial. Murakami’s stylistic and thematic impulses owe a great deal to Kafka, so much so that he even wrote a novel with Kafka’s name in the title (Kafka on the Shore).