Did the wind-up bird forget to wind your spring?

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

Here is my summary, which is somewhat deliberately confusing.

Cat (Noboru Wataya) goes missing.
    Kumiko (Toru's wife) leaves.
          May Kasahara becomes Toru's friend, dubs him 'Mr. Wind-Up Bird'.
               Toru meets Creta and Malta Kano, mystical sisters.
                  Toru goes to the well; almost gets stuck there.
                         Creta Kano comes by and saves him.
                              Toru meets Nutmeg, Cinnamon, starts working with them.
                                  Toru makes money and buys the well.
                                       Cat comes back (renamed Mackerel).
                                 Ushi comes on Wataya's behalf (brother-in-law, not cat).
                              Toru won't negotiate, demands to speak with Kumiko.
                          May goes to work in a wig factory far away.
                       Cinnamon and Nutmeg disappear without warning.
                    Toru returns to well, finds/rescues Kumiko on a separate plane.
                 Kumiko shares her plans to kill her brother (Noboru Wataya).
              Toru visits May at the wig factory, tells her the whole story.
            Kumiko on trial for murder, but confident she did the world a favor.
         Toru will wait for Kumiko.
      With their cat.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Here's a line that captures how I felt after reading this book: 

The one thing I understood for sure was that I didn't understand a thing.

I won't say that I hated the reading experience; it's more that I felt unsatisfied at the end of all the mystical twists and turns. I thought we were going to come into some kind of epic understanding when it all came together, and instead, when I finished, I just thought, hunh. That's all? 

I definitely appreciated the 'dreamlike' quality of Murakami, and would be curious to read more. That said, I'd most recommend if you're looking for a mystical, existential, wandering journey.

Theater of the Absurd
That's what this book reminded me of the most, in the same way as The Master and Margarita. Not so much magical realism, as things happening that just feel almost nonsensical, yet absolutely meant to happen. I'm not sure I'm correctly capturing the Theater of the Absurd, but whatever. That's what it felt like to me. 

Missing cats
As I mentioned in the plot synopsis, the missing cat is a fairly central theme in this novel. It does eventually return, but after reading too much Murakami on my holiday break, I became nearly convinced that Susan was at death's door. This is partly my fault, but I also blame it partly on the depth of the cat's loss in the novel. In case you were worried, Susan is alive and well. 

Trigger warnings
I don't believe in banning books, or censoring them, but I will say that if you're looking to read this one, I'd offer a few potential trigger warnings for readers like myself. Including but not limited to...

• Sexual references (not the romantic pleasant kind)
• Graphic violence (think human beings getting skinned alive)
• Dark existentialism (like, really dark.)
• Exploration of death (and the meaning (or lack thereof) of life)
• Rape/defilement (physical and mystical. yes. you read that right.)

This book in a nutshell
I loved the theme of the wind-up bird, though I'm sure I missed the greater meaning it played throughout the book. Here's a line that captures it nicely, I think. 

It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the world descended more deeply into chaos.

Love is a many-splendoured thing
I enjoy reading about various depictions of love, and perhaps my interest is heightened by never having been in love myself. In any case, I enjoyed this particular version of it, and thought to myself, now that isn't so flashy, but that sounds downright delightful.

Kumiko and I felt something for each other from the beginning. It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go. As our meetings grew more frequent, I felt not so much that I had met someone new as that I had chanced upon a dear old friend."

Referents and Reverberations
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

- Inception (film) - reading this book definitely made me want to re-watch Inception. 

- A Separate Peace by John Knowles
While I didn't totally understand the thread of WWII flashbacks that peppered the novel, it was interesting to hear such similar sentiments expressed on the Japanese generation to what I just read about in A Separate Peace. 

• We were just ordinary young men, the same as you. I never once thought I wanted to be a soldier.
• It was, of course, a make-believe peace.

It seems that everywhere the world was full of would-be soldiers who just wanted to be men. 

Title possibilities
Here are a few lines that were in the running. I think they give a nice image of the story. 

• Malta Kano - No one ever calls me. I am the one who makes the calls. 

• The point is, not to resist the flow.

• In the distance, I heard the wind-up bird cry.

• I felt as if I had become part of a badly written novel, that someone was taking me to task for being utterly unreal.

• Some kind of memory was trying to find its way out.

• Staying very still in the darkness, I became less and less convinced of the fact that I actually existed.

• The way it stands now, your life is probably just going to get weirder and weirder.

New words
shoji paper - In traditional Japanese architecture, a shōji is a door, window or room divider consisting of translucent paper over a frame of wood which holds together a lattice of wood or bamboo.

I'll leave you with this line that I enjoyed, in reference to the wind-up bird - Every day it would come to the stand of trees in our neighborhood and wind the spring of our quiet little world.

Here's hoping there's something winding the spring of your quiet world, and that you haven't spent too much time at the bottom of deep dark wells lately (literally or metaphorically). Onwards to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

Dear readers, this is an extremely short work (roughly a hundred pages, at least in my copy) and if you haven't read it, I highly recommend. Therefore, I shall share a collected poem of lines to give you a sense of the thing, but if you want more, you must go and find it yourself. Here is your poem:

- God bless me, the man seems hardly human!
- The moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde.
- I have lost confidence in myself.
- You must suffer me to go my own dark way. I have brought on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name.
- Ah, it's an ill conscience that's such an enemy to rest!
- Man is not truly one, but truly two.
- My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.
- Struggle as he might, there was borne in upon his mind a crushing anticipation of calamity.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Well now, is your interest piqued? Good. I could see immediately upon reading this why it has made its way into the 'classics'. It's concise, but it packs a great punch, and it's loaded with fascinating explorations of the human character. Go and read it for yourself, then come back and enjoy this brief blobbety-blob. 

Love affair with London
Many works involve cities in some capacity, but I have come to love books that make the city or the country the book centers around into a character of its own. Here's a line about London I loved: 

The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the procession of the town's life was still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind. He's literally describing fog, and I'm like, I want to go! Sign me up!

Going to bed and waking up someone else
Without going into too much detail (and besides, by now you've followed my advice and read it for yourself, so I'm not spoiling anything anyway), things get worse for our protagonist when he stops being able to control his transitions from Jekyll into Hyde. I loved the creepiness of this line:

I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde.

Especially because it reminded me of this line from Proust:

 So how, then, searching for our thoughts, our identities, as we search for lost objects, do we eventually recover our own self rather than any other? Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings we might be, it is the being we were the day before that we unerringly grasp.

I thought of how jarring it was for Jekyll to grasp for himself and find Hyde instead, and thought Proust would have a field day exploring that concept. ;)

Lines I Liked
This book is packed with great lines, descriptions, and all-around eerie situations. Here are a few of my favorites. 

• On an acquaintance of Dr. Jekyll - In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of downgoing men.

• His affections, like ivy, were the growth of time. God, I love this line. 

• But now his imagination also was engaged, or rather enslaved. 

• I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.

• It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me.

Words New to Me
holograph - a manuscript handwritten by the person named as its author

conveyancing - the branch of law concerned with the preparation of documents for the transferring of property; the action of preparing documents for the transfer of property

napery - household linen, especially tablecloths and napkins

baize - a coarse, feltlike, woolen material that is typically green, used for covering billiard and card tables and for aprons

turpitude - depravity; wickedness

bravo - a thug or hired assassin

I'm keeping this entry short and sweet, to match the brevity of the work. I'll leave you with these lines.

I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.

As we roll into a new year, one we cannot stop from coming, try though we might, let us consider the halves of ourselves. Let us think about how we might find a life of balance, where pleasures are not denied, nor is good abandoned. We all have some Jekyll and some Hyde in us. How we choose to navigate the pairing is entirely up to us. 

Happy New Year, and I'll see you in 2019, blobbists!

Woman must have spunks to live in this wicked world.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Wide Sargasso Sea picks up before Jane Eyre begins. If you're not familiar with the plot of Jane Eyre, feel free to read my plot summary from when I read that book for the blob here. I suppose telling you this plot will also spoil the plot of Jane Eyre for you, which is a real shame, because Jane Eyre is a great read. Suffice it to say that this book takes place largely in Jamaica and Dominica, with a short bit in England at the end. It provides the grounding and back story for the character of Bertha Mason (here, Antoinette Cosway) and how she came to be connected to Mr. Rochester.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

I know I didn't really go into detail there (I re-read my Jane Eyre plot summary and I was FAR more detail-oriented at that point in this project) but I think these are both interesting reads, so I don't care to spoil them for you. That being said, I may accidentally spoil the plots in this post, so if you're wanting to read either and haven't, hit the pause button and go read them now. 

I didn't love reading this book, but looking back, I have a real admiration and respect for it. 

"Fan fiction"/Extrapolated fiction
I haven't read much in the way of extrapolated fiction, or 'fan fiction', as I suppose some would call it these days. This book in particular took me back to March, and Geraldine Brooks's exploration of Mr. March's experiences and a more nuanced look at the historical moment. I didn't enjoy reading this one as much as I enjoyed reading March, but I think both are worthy and intriguing explorations of beautiful fictional spaces, and I appreciated the level of nuance that both brought to the table.

Race and confusion
That being said, a relatively big part of my confusion as a reader was tied up in race, and not understanding what race Antoinette was and how this played out in her life. Perhaps some (or all) of this confusion was intended on Jean Rhys's part. Speaking from the "I" perspective, though, I don't do terribly well with confusion, and if you don't ever spell something out for me, I can have a tendency to just plain miss it. 

Looking back on the book having finished it, navigating the racial and social structure of the islands was clearly a critical and challenging part of Antoinette's life (and perhaps Rhys's herself). 

Island life
I loved this passage about their garden, both for its intensity and for the way it reminded me of the overgrown space in The Secret Garden.

Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible - the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched. One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root. Twice a year the octopus orchid flowered - then not an inch of tentacle showed. It was a bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see.

Mothers
The last few books I've read for the blob have had a running theme of mothers who were not, per se, hitting it out the park. In each case, the mother had a lot of things coming at her all at once, so this isn't meant to place blame. But all three (The God of Small Things, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Wide Sargasso Sea) feature narrators who have some pretty serious hardships because of their mother's absence. Here are a few lines to paint a picture of Antoinette's mom: 

On leaving the house for full days at a time as a young child and returning at night: My mother never asked me where I had been or what I had done.

"Did you have a nightmare?'
'Yes, a bad dream.'
She sighed and covered me up. 'You were making such a noise. I must go to Pierre, you've frightened him.'" oh, yes, PIERRE WAS FRIGHTENED. Let's go check on Pierre. CLEARLY You're Fine. 

124 was spiteful.

The house was sad when she had gone.

Lines like this reminded me of Beloved, and the personification of the home itself. 

First impressions
While the islands are packed with beauty and vital intensity for Antoinette, Rochester is immediately put off by them. I loved the contrast of their experiences. 

Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near.

Rebecca and Manderley
Just as the person in the attic is an ongoing mystery in Jane Eyre, the islands act as a source of mystery. The estate's connection to the mystery reminded me of Manderley in Rebecca. I loved these lines from Rochester:

It was a beautiful place - wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd find myself thinking, 'What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing.

Is loneliness a fancy or a feeling?
I loved this exchange between Antoinette and Rochester:

Rochester: 'So this place is as lonely as it feels?' I asked her.
Antoinette: 'Yes, it is lonely. Are you happy here?'
Rochester: 'Who wouldn't be?'
Antoinette: 'I love it more than anywhere in the world. As if it were a person. More than a person.'
Rochester: 'But you don't know the world,' I teased her.

and this line from Antoinette later, which reminded me of the way I feel some times given the volatile state of the world (and occasionally my mind): 
"I am not used to happiness. It makes me afraid."

Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. 
At some point, Rochester starts calling Antoinette Bertha, even though it is absolutely not her name. I was already starting to hate Rochester in this version (which bummed me out a little because I like him in JE) but when he started doing that, I was like, is he gaslighting her? I would go a little bonkers, too, if people just started calling me a different name all the time. Can you imagine if you woke up tomorrow and people were just like, hey, I'm gonna call you a different name now. That's happening.

It also reminded me of this line in 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings': 

Every person I knew had a hellish horror of being 'called out of his name'. It was a dangerous practice to call a Negro anything that could be loosely construed as insulting because of the centuries of their having been called n***ers, jigs, dinges, blackbirds, crows, boots and spooks.

and then this one: 

Maya, on a woman named Mrs. Cullinan calling her the wrong name repeatedly, then renaming her "Mary" to suit her: I decided I wouldn't pee on her if her heart was on fire. 

Too bad Maya and Antoinette couldn't team up against Mr. Rochester. I'd like to see that showdown. 

Does adulting mean realizing our Prince Charmings are problematic?
The Rochester in this book adds some nuance (and some real ugliness) to Mr. Rochester's character. Obviously, this is one version of the back story, and perhaps not even a little the way Charlotte Brontë would have imagined it. That being said, I think the more I read, the more okay I become with nuance and complicated characters. Maybe it's just a growing up thing. ;) Here are some lines that capture Mr. Rochester.

No more damned magic. You hate me and I hate you. We'll see who hates best. 

Christophine, to Rochester: You think you fool me? You want her money but you don't want her.

Tied to a lunatic for life.

I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it. 

Referents and Reverberations
While this book reminded me of many other novels, and had a clear echo in Jane Eyre, the two most poignant connections I felt as a reader were with...

• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

It was Christophine who bought our food from the village and persuaded some girls to help her sweep and wash clothes. We would have died, my mother always said, if she had not stayed with us. this line from WSS reminded me of Merricat and Constance. I read this book for one of my book bingos, and I will have to blob on it at some point, because it was soooooooo goood.

• À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust

'I was never sad in the morning, and every day was a fresh day for me.' this line reminded me of this one from the second volume of Proust - "I was only unhappy for one day at a time."

New terms
glacis - a gently sloping bank, in particular one that slopes down from a fort, exposing attackers to the defenders' missiles

octopus orchid - an epiphytic, sympodial New World orchid native to Central America, the West Indies, Colombia, Venezuela, and southern Florida

obeah - Obeah (sometimes spelled Obi, Obeah, Obeya, or Obia) is a system of spiritual and healing practices developed among enslaved West Africans in the West Indies. Obeah is difficult to define, as it is not a single, unified set of practices; the word "Obeah" was historically not often used to describe one's own practices.

Lines I Liked

• Money is good but no money can pay for a crazy wife in your bed.

• Have spunks and do battle for yourself.

• I feel that this place is my enemy and on your side.

• What am I doing in this place and who am I?

I'm off to a brief stay in green Gretna, and moving onwards to the fictional land of split personalities. Happy happy holidays and have a merry new year if I don't blob before then!