Content Warning: Discussion of imperialism, war crimes
Spoilers for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is punctured by a series of incursions. Each of these stories depicts a different moment during Japan’s Manchurian Campaign, centering the extraordinary brutality of the imperial forces vying for supremacy in China. While the rest of the text is almost dreamlike in its story of a man searching for his missing wife through the subconscious of his community, these stories are at once nightmarish and historically situated in a way that is rarely associated with Murakami’s work. They are fragmentary, often stopping midway through and then being continued hundreds of pages later. Reading them, I often wondered what thematic role they played in the larger narrative, erupting from the text almost like traumatic flashbacks or the past coming back to haunt the present.
Murakami is widely viewed as a horny surrealist. His at times almost fetishistic writing of women a major object of critique, including in Japan. Some people view his work as effectively “Westernized” or even “Individualist,” written to placate American readers and American values and sensibilities. The critique of his sexism is based on undeniable details of the text while the accusations of Westernized individualism smack to me of American chauvinism—particularly, white people reading what they want onto a text just because it occasionally throws in a Beatles reference. Both critiques, however, miss what makes Murakami’s greatest works stand out to me: his commitment to exposing in savage detail the pathologies of a society that abandons those most in need. His best work has a psychoanalytic rigor (including in its depiction of female characters!) that is unmatched in its critiques of societal melancholy, and nowhere is that more apparent than in his masterpiece, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
I have long been drawn to texts that engage with empty fields of history, such as Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom!, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and Morrison’s Beloved. Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments eventually gave me the language to describe this kind of storytelling when it is applied to marginalized people, critical fabulation: the theory and practice of reading against the grain of the historical archive, attempting to recover the interiority of those who have been silenced by history while always being aware of the impossibility of such a task.
What the The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle adds to our understanding of this fabulation is an investigation not just into the interiorities of those whose stories are lost to history, but also the psyches of those for whom these stories are lost: what repressing so much of one’s history does to the psyche of a nation. Murakami suggests an analogue of critical fabulation as being the path out of the melancholy this repression creates. Each successive generation in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle attempts to find a path out of suffering, groping at lost histories to understand themselves so they can actually connect with others and forcing a reckoning for readers with Japan’s imperial legacies.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Murakami’s Context
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle marked a significant turning point in Murakami’s writing. His previous works had largely focused on the interior lives of men in speculative fictional settings or in suddenly aborted romantic entanglements. After Wind-Up Bird, however, Murakami wrote a series of books dealing explicitly with social issues and marginalized people in society–depicting a lesbian romance in Sputnik Sweetheart and challenging rigid gender norms, transphobia, and ideological violence in Kafka on the Shore, which centers on the mentor relationship between a trans man and a young survivor of child abuse. He would eventually write an oral history based on a series of interviews with the survivors and perpetrators of the Tokyo Sarin Gas Attacks titled Underground, the thrust of which seemed to be that the violence was a direct result of Japan’s organized abandonment of those struggling with poverty and mental illness and refusal to acknowledge the hidden wounds of history.
All of this can largely be seen as an extension of the themes laid out in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, whose protagonist explores the inner recesses of the Japanese psyche. After his wife leaves him, seemingly being trafficked by his center-right politician rapist brother-in-law, Toru Okada takes it on himself to try to find her. Through a series of conversations with various people harmed by his brother-in-law or erased from the narrative of Japanese history, as well as many hours of meditative introspection at the bottom of a well, Toru does not necessarily come to a meaningful realization so much as a confrontation with unknowability–and a refusal to abandon those who he cares about or remain willfully ignorant of the violence surrounding them.
Central to Toru’s journey is his encounter with two figures whose lives were indelibly impacted by the Japanese imperial campaign in Manchuria: the first is Lieutenant Mamiya, who was captured during the campaign, left for dead at the bottom of a well, and somehow climbed out only to be sent to a forced labour camp. Toru learns his story in a series of interviews and letters, each of which reveals a man who is only alive in the biological sense, as his trauma from his time as a prisoner of war has robbed him of any joy. The second is the young mute man Cinnamon and the grandfather he never met. This grandfather had been a veterinarian during World War II in the occupied Chinese province of Manchukuo, and Cinnamon attempts to piece together his story based on a combination of intuition and ancestral memory. Cinnamon’s grandfather’s story, as he tells it, is despairing and searing in its critique of the Japanese occupying forces, presenting them as covering up their baseline incompetence with petty murder. They one-by-one spear to death a group of Chinese teenagers who challenge their imperial rule with the tip of their bayonets, then beat the last one to death with a baseball bat. The subtitle of Cinnamon’s section is, tellingly, “The Zoo Attack, or: A Clumsy Massacre.”
In 1995, the same year that “The Zoo Attack” came out in The New Yorker, the prime minister of Japan Murayama released a statement on the 50th Anniversary of the end of WWII. In it, he envisioned a future of peace in Asia, while offering apology for the tremendous harms and horrors of the Japanese Imperial campaign and arguing for an end to “self-righteous nationalism.” This statement is remarkable from an American perspective in 2026, given the absurdity of our current government’s embrace of violence, war-mongering nationalism.
Simultaneously, the Japanese government and associated organizations were taking positions that largely covered up the scale of the violence it did. The Veteran association Kaikosha’s commission, even as it expressed its extreme contrition at the violence done, claimed that only 3,000 to 13,000 people were killed in Nanking in contrast to the 300,000 claimed by the Chinese government. Their language is remarkable: “We began our work of checking the military history, knowing that we were not completely clean. But with this huge number, we simply have no words. Whatever the severity of war or specificity of war psychology, we just lose words faced with this mass illegal killing.” Narrative and meaning die in the process of public mourning as they becomes incorporated into the scene of national politics, confusing nihilism and accountability. The hidden wounds of Japanese Imperialism become the source of melancholia.
Melancholic Objects and Hidden Wounds
Hidden wounds are at the heart of Murakami’s project, as Toru’s place as a psychic mediator allows him to access the deepest recesses of those he comes into contact with. In various parts of the novel, he listens to stories of survivors of profound sexual violence and human trafficking and talks to a young woman as she processes the reality of her own carelessness likely having killed her boyfriend. He literally goes into a well to investigate the inner recesses of his own mind–and in doing so, is able to finally make contact with his lost wife. He ultimately becomes somewhat of a spiritual practitioner, helping those around him to connect to a deeper part of themselves or their histories they have lost.
What all of the characters Toru encounters share is a sense of melancholic attachment to the suffering they have endured or themselves caused, replicating and replaying or repressing and rejecting their memories ad nauseum as their attachment to the lost object of their melancholia drives them. May Kasahara, who put her hands over her boyfriend’s eyes while he was riding a motorcycle just to see what would happen (thus killing him), shuts Toru into his well for days without food or water, just to see what would happen. On the surface, she responds to the violence of her past with a nihilistic lightness, seeing those around her as objects of play. However, the way she describes her motivations and inner life as she reflects on the situation with Toru afterwards is as a desire for connection–she wanted to be able to fully imagine what Toru was feeling, and know for certain she was right. She went down into the well herself, and, after a few hours, she felt something crawling out of her, something terrifying, which she describes as the only real thing to her in a fake world. She eventually understands this to be the thing that drives her even as her body rejects it–what we would call her melancholic object. She says she wanted Toru to understand this experience, which is why she shut him in the well.
May Kasahara is not one of the characters whose life is directly impacted by the Manchukuo campaign, but her story illustrates many key themes that Murakami is working through on a subtler level in those sections. Her loss of a sense of reality and extreme alienation are emblematic of the dual lightness and melancholia that Murakami seems to see in much of Japanese society. (The acuity of May’s psychological portrayal has been highly praised by one of Murakami’s main feminist critics, in fact, in the same interview in which she critiques the male gaze of many of Murakami’s later works.)
This is also reflected in the experiences of Lieutenant Mamiya, who cannot work through the astonishing violence he was subject to in his time in the Imperial Army, and spends his entire life a husk of a person. Mamiya, having witnessed his fellow soldier be skinned alive by a Russian agent, had been shut into a well. He would have to pull himself out, and what he was met with at the surface was years of hard labor and political maneuvering to survive being a prisoner of war. He barely survived, and as he was dragging himself out of the well, felt as if a part of him died.
Mamiya describes the light of the sun coming into the well for less than a minute each day as burning him away, destroying the part of him that experiences joy and drives him. There is something almost theological about this imagery, calling to mind how Ted Chiang in the roughly contemporaneous story “Hell is the Absence of God.” In it, Chiang describes how experiencing the searing, glorious light of God’s presence makes the absence of God in hell all the more devastating for the one person who had experienced it. This light also calls to mind the searing light of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Taken together, meaning and purpose’s abandonment of Japan in the searing light of imperialism seems to have destroyed Mamiya’s sense of self. He is cursed to live on without purpose, a symbol for an embattled nation struggling to contend with its own place in the imperial order.
Cinnamon and Critical Fabulation
Cinnamon is part of a succeeding generation, distant enough from WWII and the Sino-Japanese War to not be directly harmed by it but left with a hole in his family narrative in its wake, a hole where his grandfather should be. Cinnamon’s stories of his grandfather are not comforting. They reveal no sense of longing for a loving, familial connection with one’s grandfather. On the contrary, they are devastating depictions of Japanese incompetence in the war, presenting an occupying force that is ultimately barbaric in its cruelty towards its Chinese colonial subjects. His grandfather himself is not portrayed as a heroic dissenter—-far from it, he is cowardly, bearing witness and doing very little as Japanese soldiers beat a Chinese teenager to death with a baseball bat right in front of him. In his last moments, the dying teenager grabs Cinnamon’s grandfather and drags him down into the mass grave with him and the other corpses. He could not escape the reality of his complicity: just like for Toru, Mamiya, and May, underground is the site where meaning is made and lost.
Cinnamon’s stories are not technically what Saidiya Hartman would describe as examples of “critical fabulation,” given the scope of his investigation and his reliance on ancestral memory and imagination. However, the resonances are unmistakable: Cinnamon, just like Hartman, is attempting to push at the boundaries of what is knowable, to assemble the inner lives of people whose stories are inconvenient to the Japanese government.
I want to quote an extended passage from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, from when Toru has finished reading Cinnamon’s story of his grandfather and is trying to understand why he wrote it. To me, this passage connects all the pieces of history, memory studies, and psychology that the book is trying to get at:
I had some idea, however vague, of what Cinnamon was looking for in his writing. He was engaged in a serious search for the meaning of his own existence. And he was hoping to find it by looking into the events that had preceded his birth. To do that, Cinnamon had to fill in those blank spots in the past that he could not reach with his own hands. By using those hands to make a story, he was trying to supply the missing links. From the stories he had heard repeatedly from his mother, he derived further stories in an attempt to re-create the enigmatic figure of his grandfather in a new setting. He inherited from his mother’s stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual. The question of which parts of a story were factual and which parts were not was probably not a very important one for Cinnamon. The important question for Cinnamon was not what his grandfather did but what his grandfather might have done. He learned the answer to this question as soon as he succeeded in telling the story.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, emphasis mine
What we see emphasized in this passage is what Hartman calls the subjunctive mood–the might have been’s, the could be’s, the narratives and hopes we construct. For those whose generational memory has been erased, a group of which I count myself a member, the subjunctive mood provides a path forward: to “both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling”–to live as if our ancestors’ stories and interiorities are things we could potentially access, learn from, and breathe through, with enough imagination, care, and bravery. To live as if we could know them, and, in Cinnamon’s case, as if we could learn from their failings and cowardice. He reclaims meaning from the empty space of his grandfather’s narrative, refusing the denial of accountability that leads to nihilism.
May Kasahara’s Escape into Ordinary Unhappiness
May Kasahara and Cinnamon emerge as the true hearts of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as the book reaches its end. As Cinnamon attempts to make meaning of the past, May Kasahara finds meaning in the present. She takes a job in a wig factory, becomes friends with the other girls who live there, and begins to feel at peace. She, Sisyphus-like, finds in the everyday her “ordinary unhappiness,” the state which Freud says is the ideal outcome of psychotherapy.
When May is working on the wigs, memories come to her slowly. Before, her memories were fragmentary and shaped by melancholy–remembering the most grotesque aspects of her lost boyfriend: “his smelly armpits, or what a totally dumb guy he was or his fingers trying to get into strange places of mine.” May’s boyfriend after his death was rendered a series of images rather than a person, broken into small pieces that could be compartmentalized into, roughly, “what can be used to justify my negative feelings about him” (the rejected object) and “what I must never think about because it is too painful” (the repressed object). But, through working on the wigs and a process of healing, she slowly integrates these parts of her memory, and thereby integrates herself, accepting the parts of him that she does not hate. She is finally able to grieve.
May’s integration and acceptance is most beautifully illustrated in her last letter to Toru. In it, she writes with such intense visual clarity, describing a scene of “duck people” in a cold lake in imagistic prose. She is actually seeing and experiencing what is around her, unclouded by melancholy. She eventually describes herself laying in the moonlight, touching every part of her body and how she “dipped them in moonlight, like taking a bath.” Every part of herself, a body that previously she had thought of as disparate, broken pieces, she baptizes in the moonlight, declaring them worthy of acceptance.
It is hard to consider what it means to find peace with the past. I myself struggle with this, as a descendant of refugees from the Sino-Japanese War whose lives were cut short by the PTSD and poverty of immigrant life in America. Finding myself connecting so deeply with a novel that presents the other side of this conflict has been part of a constellation of ways I have found my own ordinary unhappiness.
Readers of this article may find themselves unsure of their own histories–where I live, the reality of America is an encounter with repressed knowledge and culture. A nation that chooses to forget its past never is actually able to–it is just pushed into the subconscious, always driving the workings of society through its superstructures unacknowledged and unrepented. As Anne Cheng reminds us in The Melancholy of Race, marginalized groups become society’s melancholic objects, rejected and repressed yet driving society and holding it together. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle points to a different kind of historical memory, where we can acknowledge interiority without letting go of accountability. If we want to rid society of its sickness, we must be brave and imaginative–embracing the subjunctives and the might-have-beens, reclaiming meaning from the nihilism of national repression. By pushing at the boundaries of the might-be, could be, and should be, we create what is.
