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Book 3, Chapter 13
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
Nutmeg discloses to Toru that her son, Cinnamon, stopped speaking shortly before his sixth birthday. Despite consulting multiple specialists, no one could identify the physical or emotional cause for his condition. Toru sees Cinnamon often, and they’re on friendly terms. Cinnamon delivers Toru’s groceries and clean clothes. At this point, they are comfortable in each other’s presence, even though their interactions remain silent.
Because Cinnamon cannot speak, Nutmeg has no idea what happened the night where he found the heart under the tree. Additionally, this section highlights that Cinnamon and Nutmeg have become adequate replacements for the many people Toru has lost over the past year.
Themes
At one of their meals together, Nutmeg tells Toru that she decided to educate Cinnamon herself. Although Cinnamon didn’t speak, he excelled academically and displayed remarkable language-learning abilities. At only twelve years old, following the death of his grandmother, Cinnamon was able to take care of himself.
Like Noboru, Cinnamon is exceptionally intelligent. However, like Noboru, and virtually every other character in the novel, Cinnamon is socially isolated—in his case, because of his disability.
Themes
Nutmeg suspects that Cinnamon’s loss of speech may be because he became too obsessed with the stories she told him about her past. She thinks that the zoo massacre, in particular, may have been too much for him. She posits that something within the stories themselves managed to come out and rip Cinnamon’s speech away from him. She also suggests the same force is responsible for her husband’s death.
The force Nutmeg mentions could be the wind-up bird. After all the wind-up bird was present the night Cinnamon lost his voice (if readers assume that the unnamed young boy in the two earlier sections is Cinnamon) and in her father’s stories. Perhaps it also caused Cinnamon’s husband’s death, though Murakami has yet to reveal the details of that occurrence.
Themes
