The life of a very settled Japanese man slowly spins into weirdness after his cat disappears. Cool, weird, and somewhat unsatisfactory as the pieces of the puzzle don't really fit together.
Quotes:
There was a small stand of trees nearby, and from it you could hear the mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring. We called it the wind-up bird. Kumiko gave it the name.
Going out to work can be tough, not something sweet and peaceful like picking the prettiest rose in your garden for your sick grandmother and spending the day with her, two streets away. Sometimes you have to do unpleasant things with unpleasant people, and the chance to call home never comes up.
“Don’t let it bother you. You’re not the only one. Tons of horses die when the moon’s full.”
Only much later did it occur to me that I had found my way into the core of the problem.
I owned a signed copy of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain.
I knew the names of all the brothers Karamazov.
“Mr. Okada,” she said, “I believe that you are entering a phase of your life in which many different things will occur. The disappearance of your cat is only the beginning.”
“I do have one small bit of information that I can share with you,” Malta Kano said, looking down at me, after she had put on her red hat. “You will find your polka-dot tie, but not in your house.”
So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little.
It suddenly occurred to me that I had not heard the wind-up bird for quite some time.
“The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,”
A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself with its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it—even if the person himself wants to stop it.”
I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment—perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance.
“You see, Mr. Okada, I am a prostitute. I used to be a prostitute of the flesh, but now I am a prostitute of the mind. Things pass through me.”
What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that’s not true at all. The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to forget all that. Don’t you agree? Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is ocean, and all we can see of it with the naked eye is the surface: the skin. We hardly know anything about what’s underneath the skin.”
In truly deep darkness, all kinds of strange things were possible.
Anything could happen. The possibility is there.
This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.
“Bird as Prophet.”
To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror.
Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge.”
Money had no name, of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.
The Miyawakis’ eldest daughter, a college student at the time, is still missing.
You have now gained access to the program “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.”
fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual.
Boris the Manskinner.
“I’m going to take you out of here,” I said, cutting her off. “I’m going to take you home, to the world where you belong, where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning.” “And how are you going to do that?” the woman asked. “How are you going to take me out of here, Mr. Okada?” “The way they do in the fairy tales,” I said. “By breaking the spell.”
“Goodbye, May Kasahara,” I said. Goodbye, May Kasahara: may there always be something watching over you.
