Sipped Ink vol 2 issue 9

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle pp561-607

The thing about cowardice is that it has the power to shape one’s fate.

Where Murakami’s novel is partly concerned with the ability of the past to shape the future, he is also dealing with the question of the worth of individual agency. Circumstance is one thing, he ultimately seems to say, and individual action another. Whether the one overpowers the other or can be countermanded by it depends to some extent on the individual. Where Creta Kano somehow survives her encounter with Noboru Wataya, others are less fortunate. Toru is taken to the brink of losing everything because he isn’t strong enough to intervene.

In the novel’s closing sections we see Toru struggle with his perception of himself. ‘I had not beaten Noboru Wataya with a baseball bat. I was not that kind of person’ (569), he thinks, moments before he’s engaged in exactly that act. But crucially it’s a fight that occurs in the dark, with an adversary he’s not permitted to see even when he’s ostensibly victorious. Even when engaged in the struggle Toru can’t conceive that its his own self, and his own actions, against which he’s fighting. He holds the bat, and he weilds the knife.

As Kumiko says of her imprisonment: ‘I was the chain that bit into my ankle, and I was the ruthless guard that never slept’ (602). Toru’s inability to recognise that the same is true for him is his failing in the moment. And to his credit, he is able at least to recognise the futility of the circumstance:

I had come to the wrong place to say the wrong things to the wrong person. (576)

The penalty for losing one’s true self in this way is evidenced elsewhere in the novel. We see what it does to Creta Kano, and we have the testimony of Mamiya:

I have lived my life in total defeat. I have lost. I am lost. I am qualified for nothing. Through the power of the curse, I love no one and am loved by no one. (564)

This message is communicated to Toru in time to frame his final journey down the well for what it is: an encounter with himself in which the stakes could not be higher. Mamiya’s parting wish for Toru could not be plainer:

May the life you lead be a good one, a life free of regrets. (564)

And so when Toru finds himself in the dark, swinging wildly at an unknown assailant, and suffering the wounds that are dealt to him, it is not a baseball bat that provides his only chance of defence, but the possibility that he might accept the extent to which it is not circumstance, nor fate, nor the weight of the past that has brought him to this point, but his own actions.

In the end however, Toru must be rescued from the well as he sits paralysed and preparing to drown. And only at this final moment, does he recant his adherence to self-deception:

But in the end, I had to recognize the truth. However hard I attempted to deceive myself, it would not go away. The water level was rising. (588)

A cat disappears, and a cat returns. A woman is lost, and then found. A man visits some other place, and then returns.

But are any of them the same?

The cat’s tail is not bent in the same way. The woman, unseen, speaks with different voices. The man gains and loses a mark on his face.

The woman sees the cat as indicative of the relationship between herself and the man:

He was always a symbol of something good that grew up between us. We should not have lost him when we did.

What sent it away?

I should have opened up to you long ago, confessed everything to you, but unfortunately I lacked the courage to do so. And I still harboured the groundless hope that things would not turn out so badly. The result has been this nightmare for us both. (601)

What brought it back?