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Book 1, Chapter 8
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Reality and Subjective Experience
Free Will
Desire and Irrationality
The Personal Impact of War
Social Alienation
Summary
Analysis
After Creta leaves, Toru falls asleep while wondering what happened after Creta met Noboru. While asleep, Toru has a strange dream. In the dream, he is sitting at a bar where he sees Malta. He tries walking up to Malta, but she moves away. As he tries to chase after Malta, a man with no face stops him and asks Toru to follow him. Toru does as the man asks. The man takes Toru to room number 208. He lets Toru in and tells him that a server already delivered the whisky he requested to the room.
Psychoanalysis—a form of psychological theory and practice that Sigmund Freud popularized in the late-19th and early 20th century—emphasizes the influence of unconscious, repressed conflicts on a person’s behavior, with dreams providing access to those unrealized conflicts and desires. According to this model, figures and objects in dreams correspond with people and things in the real world, although sometimes the relationships are abstract. Toru’s dreams certainly follow this model, so it is worth examining the relationship between his reality and his dreams through this lens.
Themes
Toru steps into the room and goes looking for the whisky. He goes to all the cabinet doors in the room and tries to open them, but they do not open. While searching for the whisky, Toru hears Creta call out to him. He turns around and sees that Creta is in the room with him, naked. Creta tells Toru that they do not have much time, and then proceeds to perform fellatio on him. Toru finds the dream immensely pleasurable, so much so that he has an orgasm in his sleep.
While some of Toru’s dreams are difficult to parse symbolically, this one is quite clear on the surface. He is attracted to Creta and desires her sexually. Like the conversation Toru had with the mysterious woman earlier in the novel, the shift to sex is sudden and frank.
Themes
Toru’s orgasm causes him to wake up. As he cleans himself up, the telephone rings. On the other end is Kumiko. Kumiko is immediately suspicious of Toru because she thinks his voice sounds funny. Toru feels strange talking to Kumiko so soon after having the dream about Creta and is bothered that Kumiko notices his discomfort. Toru promises Kumiko that nothing unusual has happened and that he only sounds strange because she woke him up from a nap. However, it does not seem like Kumiko believes Toru. Before she hangs up, Kumiko tells Toru that she will not be home in time for dinner.
Kumiko reads Toru much better than Toru reads Kumiko. Kumiko immediately knows when something is off, even if Toru will not admit it. Meanwhile, Toru never finds himself second-guessing anything Kumiko tells him. He takes her words at face value and does not doubt their veracity. However, readers, as objective, outside observers, may find the fact that Kumiko is constantly busy with work and coming home late to be somewhat suspicious.
Themes
Toru’s conversation with Kumiko makes him think of the time when he almost cheated on Kumiko with another woman. The other woman was a work friend who was about to leave Toru’s company because she was moving away to be with the man she was about to marry. The night of the woman’s going-away party, she invites Toru to her apartment for coffee. Toru accepts the invitation. While drinking coffee together, the woman asks Toru about his greatest fear. Toru says he cannot think of anything in particular. The woman tells Toru that her greatest fear is culverts because she got trapped in one as a child. As the woman speaks, Toru realizes that the language she uses to describe culverts is a metaphor for her fear of marriage.
A culvert is a tunnel created under a roadway to let water flow through. This woman’s story of getting trapped beneath a culvert resonates with the novel’s well imagery. Notably, culverts and wells hold and carry water. When the woman opens up to Toru about her marriage, she seems to imply that she would like Toru to reciprocate. would like him to do the same. However, Toru has nothing to say about his marriage—perhaps because there is nothing to be said, meaning that Toru doesn’t have any reservations about his marriage to Kumiko at this point in his life.
Themes
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After the discussion about fears, the woman asks Toru to hold her so she can recharge her batteries. She claims that she needs human touch whenever her batteries are low. Toru agrees to hold the woman and does so for several hours. The feeling of the woman against his body makes Toru sexually aroused, but he makes an active decision not to have sex with her.
The woman clearly desires Toru, but he does not give in to her advances. Toru’s behavior is peculiar. On the one hand, he chooses to stay with the woman late into the night, knowing what his continued presence will imply—to the woman, and to Kumiko. On the other hand, he shows restraint and does not have sex with her. Though he is not guilty of adultery, he is not entirely innocent, either, as he likely understands that his behavior will hurt Kumiko but goes ahead with it anyway.
Themes
When Toru returns home to Kumiko, Kumiko asks him where he has been. At first, Toru tries to lie. However, when he sees that Kumiko does not believe him, he decides to tell the truth. Kumiko is furious when she hears about the other woman and does not know whether to believe Toru when he claims he did not have sex with her. Kumiko does not talk to Toru for several days, though eventually she forgives him. However, Kumiko’s forgiveness comes with a stipulation; she tells Toru that one day she will do the same thing to him. When that day comes, she expects him to forgive her, just as she has forgiven him.
Again, Kumiko shows that she can read Toru well and immediately sees through his lies. Understandably, Kumiko does not believe Toru when he tells her the truth, partially because he has already lied and partially because the truth is so strange. Meanwhile, Kumiko’s stipulation sounds like a bit of ominous foreshadowing. Given how late Kumiko has been coming home from work lately, it seems like she may be carrying out her end of the bargain and cheating on Toru.
Themes
Shortly after Toru’s call with Kumiko, Toru hears May calling to him from the garden. She tells him she is about to go to work and asks him if he would like to come. Since he has nothing else to do, Toru says that he will. Together, the two of them head to a busy intersection where they fill out surveys relating to men’s hair. Their job is to survey the population and report their observations to the wig maker that May works for. While working together, Toru and May engage each other in casual conversation. Eventually, their conversation turns more serious, and May asks Toru whether he thinks life is meaningless. Toru tells May that life has meaning and that she should not be so pessimistic. In response, May says that most people are not pessimistic enough based on what she has seen.
May’s job involves examining other people superficially; she never interacts with the men she is surveying, and the job itself provides men with something to alter their physical appearance. However, the superficiality of the job is juxtaposed with the deeper, philosophical conversations that Toru and May have with each other. May is exceptionally pessimistic for someone so young, and her words suggest that something terrible has happened to make her this way.
Themes
