In Toru
Okada's version, his wife Kumiko named the wind-up
bird, the unfortunate sound
of a mechanical cry which would follow him in his misadventures. Foretells for
all those who heard the bird are not auspicious - we will know that later in
the book. A Murakami's invention, the wind-up bird is a kind of invisible dark
sorcerer specialized in characters' vanishing and the (apparently casual)
meeting of other characters. Demonic powers and their connection with the scars
of the World War II in modern Japan are always present.
The wind-up bird - a delusional childhood dream or a metaphor for the Hiroshima
and Nagasaki airplanes? The author seems to tell us that beauty can coexist
with horror, dreams with reality, the lightness of natural shapes with the
weight of mechanical and social gears, emotion with rationality, destiny with
free will (the wind-up bird presages can coexist with a stubbornly open
narrative, which annoyed some critics). Meanwhile, death is seductive, evil is
ambitious - and fragment-built. Just like hope.
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