The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Redeeming. The innumerable opinions and notes on this work do not give justice to the masterpiece that it is. Now this is distinctively Murukami, epic, superb, astounding, is what I would have said, but alas, as clichés are, the book is boring.

The surreality the readers love about this book (and of Murakami) is a trap. The story carries an atmosphere where anything can happen, which antithetically results in nothing happening. That is only the tip of the iceberg though (a cliché of which I'd say, Murakami did nothing to avoid employing). What bugs (cliché) me however is that Murakami knowingly wrote a 600-paged novel tackling an epic story only to leave out things unexplained, unsubstantiated and unanswered.

Surreal. Defined by Merriam-Webster as:

1. marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream; also: unbelievable, fantastic

Under the definition Murakami hits the spot (cliché). The book was irrational and dream like. In some instances (cliché) the prose is simply too verbose it was practically begging for brevity to make some sense, but not even the kind that would give you a minuscule fragmented understanding of the story. Not to mention it was repetitious (perhaps the fault lies in the translation of the material? perhaps this too is a compliment).

Someone on this site said that the book is a flawed masterpiece. I interject, out of sheer audacity more than the cheated feeling of reading a 600-paged novel absolutely arriving nowhere, that technically a masterpiece is something done with extraordinary skill and a flaw is an imperfection or weakness. This is what is now either a masterpiece or a flawed work of art. Either way, I give up on Murakami.

To his credit I enjoyed a subplot (on the WWII) better than anything contained in the book. But alas, even that was lost and forgotten.