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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’s phone rings. He picks it up and greets his caller, but no one answers. Toru can tell someone is on the other end of the line but anything he says gets met with silence. After a moment, Toru figures that his caller must be the mysterious woman. Annoyed, Toru blatantly says that he is not interested in phone sex right now and that the person on the other end of the line needs to stop calling him.
The silence on the phone symbolically mirrors the emptiness and loneliness that Toru feels in his life. However, although it is not unreasonable to assume that the person on the other end of the line is the mysterious woman, his thinking is rather presumptuous, considering there are other possibilities regarding the identity of his interlocutor.
Themes
To Toru’s surprise, the person on the other end of the line turns out to be May. May chastises Toru for having phone sex with women other than his wife. After all, what would have happened if it was Kumiko calling and she heard that instead of May? Additionally, May tells him that she came over to his house earlier and saw him cuddled up with Creta. Again, she reminds him that if she was Kumiko, things could have turned out much worse. May claims that she came over in the first place because she saw Toru hanging out near her house and looking sad. However, now she worries that he actually has too much company, especially from women.
May identifies what, up to this point, is something Toru has not realized; his life revolves around women. Nearly everyone he interacts with is female, and there is a sexual component to most of these relationships. Although Toru does not think he is actively pursuing such relationships with women, they are happening, nonetheless. May smartly advises Toru to get ahold of whatever is causing this change in his life before it permanently ruins his relationship with Kumiko.
Themes
After he gets off the phone with May, Toru begins packing a bag, which includes a rope ladder and a flashlight. Then, he writes a note to let Kumiko know where he is going in case she returns. Toru makes his way to the Miyawaki residence and walks around to the back where the well sits. Once there, he anchors his rope ladder to a nearby tree and uses it to climb to the bottom of the well.
Toru realizes that May is correct and that he needs to regain control of his life. As such, he heads to the Miyawaki residence, presumably to try to recreate Mamiya’s experience in the well and achieve some degree of personal enlightenment. Toru knows how extreme Mamiya's experience was, which speaks to his level of desperation.
Themes
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As Toru descends into the well, its depth shocks him. The farther he goes, the more afraid the well makes him. There is something unreal about the well; a well this deep should not be possible in a city like Tokyo. As he makes his way down the ladder, Toru looks up into the night sky and sees a half moon, which reminds him of Malta’s prediction. Moments later, his feet touch the bottom of the well.
The well is a portal into the unreal or surreal world, which will be important later on. Whatever this alternate world is, it resides in Toru’s unconscious mind. While Toru’s unconscious figuratively lies beneath his conscious, waking mind, the well literally lies below the surface of the known, visible world.
Themes
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