By Stuart Mitchner

I was a wing in heaven blue … I was a vision in another eye …

—Patti Smith, from “Wing”

Midway through National Poetry Month, I found a poem Patti Smith sang for Haruki Murakami after presenting him with a literary prize in Berlin 10 years ago. The song ends “And if there’s one thing … Could do for you … You’d be a wing … In heaven blue.” In her memoir M Train (2015), Smith calls Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Knopf 1997) a “devastating” masterpiece that she immediately wanted to reread because she “did not wish to exit its atmosphere.” She was haunted by “the ghost of a phrase” that had to do with “the fate of a certain property” in the opening chapter.

Having just finished Murakami’s epic of wonders and horrors, I’ve also been haunted by the beginning, where the narrator, Toru Okada, is searching for his lost cat and ends up, in Smith’s words, “at an abandoned house on an overgrown lot with a paltry bird sculpture and an obsolescent well.” What particularly intrigued me was Okada’s reference to “the mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring. We called it the wind-up bird” although “we didn’t know what it was really called or what it looked like, but that didn’t bother 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.” That last sentence winds the spring of the book.

In her quest to learn the fate of the abandoned house, Patti Smith returned to one of the final chapters, where she was disappointed to find that the house had been sold and that the well — the portal to the novel’s dreams and mysteries — had been sealed. Probing the core of Murakami’s conception, she wondered what did the wind-up bird look like? While she could picture the bird sculpture, “poised to fly,” she had “no clue about the wind-up bird. Did it possess a tiny bird heart? A hidden spring composed of an unknown alloy?” She’d found her way to these questions because of her “obsessive” fascination with the mysterious, ill-fated house. The process resembled the course that Smith follows throughout M Train, as she studies the poetry of mystery (which may be what the “M” in M Train actually stands for).

Translating Horror

Now and then during my week with Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird I was close to losing patience with the book because the atmosphere Patti Smith “did not wish to exit” sometimes reeked of death and decay, of murder and mutilation graphically described. One passage in particular is discussed by the novel’s translator, Jay Rubin, in the January 22, 2005 Guardian. Referring to a scene “in which a Japanese espionage agent is skinned alive by a Mongolian army officer,” Rubin says, “I remember living with this chapter day after day as I translated it from Murakami’s gruesome Japanese into (I hope) equally gruesome English. I once tried to talk to Murakami himself about this passage, but he refused: it was just too sickening, he said…. I’m not saying that translating a text is more intense than writing it to begin with — after all, the author had to imagine every detail he put into the scene — but it’s safe to say that translating is the most intense form of reading you can do.”

Ready to Give Up

Patti Smith may have had such scenes in mind when she said the novel “did me in, setting in motion an unstoppable trajectory, like a meteor hurtling toward a barren and entirely innocent sector of earth.” My only issue wasn’t with the violence, however. I also found myself becoming weary of an overload of characters and conceits, unable to sustain much more than a marginal interest in the elegant, fabulously wealthy woman the narrator calls Nutmeg and her mute son Cinnamon.

When the book threatened to lose me, I searched out novelist Jonathan Franzen’s 2017 Daily Beast celebration: “While you’re reading it, everything in the world feels different. And that for me is the mark of a great novel.” Another thing that had kept me reading was my wife’s admiration, which, however, began waning toward the end, so that as I approached the last chapters I was close to giving up the game.

Execution by Bat

But then Murakami rallied and the game was on. In the context of baseball, it was if the author’s team, the Wind-Up Birds, had come to life with a freakish walk-off win in the last of the 16th inning. Picture a pinch hitter conceived in the witch’s brew of Edgar Allan Poe’s imagination crouched over the plate with the blackest of bats and then with one fiendish, perverse, insolent swing launching the first pitch he sees out of the park. In the stadium’s stunned silence, you could almost hear the raspy, creaky cry of the wind-up bird winding the spring of the book.

When the narrative returned to Manchuria in August 1945 (after “some kind of special new bomb wiped out the whole city of Hiroshima in a split second”), Murakami turned things around using Toru Okada’s weapon of choice, a baseball bat. We’d already endured descriptions of execution by bayonet, and now, just when another round of mutilation is looming, we’re treated to an ingenious piece of black comedy, wherein a Chinese POW in a baseball uniform (number 4, the clean-up hitter on the prison team) is executed with “an ordinary bat” that had “a rough finish and an uneven grain,” swung by a young soldier who had never in his life played baseball. Because this was the first time he’d ever swung a bat, his superior officer had to show him “the basics of the swing” — “See? It’s all in the hips…. Starting from the backswing, you twist from the waist down. The tip of the bat follows through naturally.” After a few practice swings, the soldier delivered the gruesome equivalent of a home run, the “brand of the bat” making a direct hit behind the victim’s ear. At this point, Murakami takes the whole episode over the top with a piece of Grand Guignol that inspired my fantasy of Murakami’s walk-off win. With a new season of baseball underway, I should note that on Opening Day, April 1978, it was as “the satisfying crack when bat met ball resounded through Jingu Stadium” that Murakami found his vocation: “I think I can write a novel.”

Murakami’s “Catcher”

It would take another column to demonstrate why the teenager May Kasahara holds one of the keys to the dark dynamics of The Wind-Up Bird. There’s a clue to her origins in what Murakami says about one of his favorite novels, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: “It’s a dark story, very disturbing. I enjoyed it when I was seventeen, so I decided to translate it. I remembered it as being funny, but it’s dark and strong. I must have been disturbed when I was young.”

Making Connections

With all the moving parts of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in play, a connection I missed is the one Smith makes when she recalls flying to Berlin to present Murakami with the Die Welt Literature Prize and to sing him a song. Writing in April 2021 on her substack blog (“The reader is my notebook”), she begins with a reading of Murakami’s story, “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,” which reminds her that the first poem she ever published was a eulogy to the jazz legend called “Bird is Free” that appeared in the local paper in 1963, the same year Murakami published his first piece, a review of a Charlie Parker album he’d “made up” as a way of giving “new life to his favorite player.” At the Berlin event, however, the only winged creature Smith had in mind was the “enigmatic bird sculpture” and the mystery surrounding it. Ever the detective, she had to know what happened to it, where was it? At the reception following the presentation, when she finally “got up the courage to ask him,” Murakami “seemed, or pretended to seem, confounded. He insinuated that he had already covered that book with the topsoil of several others and the bird sculpture had flown from memory.”

A year later in M Train, Smith returned to her unanswered question in a chapter titled, “How I Lost the Wind-Up Bird.” Boarding a connecting flight in Houston after a reading in Mexico, she realizes she’s left behind her copy of the novel — “a heavily marked-up paperback stained with coffee and olive oil, my traveling companion…. Quite by accident I had let go of the string attached to Murakami’s well, the abandoned lot, and the bird sculpture.” Having found a real-life home for herself earlier in the chapter, she no longer needed the fictional property she’d been looking for, which now could go back to “the interconnected world of Murakami. The wind-up bird’s work was done.”

Smith outlines the mystery in her August 5, 2014 New York Times review of Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru and His Years of Pilgrimage: “The writer sits at his desk and makes us a story. A story not knowing where it is going, not knowing itself to be magic. Closure is an illusion, the winking of the eye of a storm. Nothing is completely resolved in life, nothing is perfect. The important thing is to keep living because only by living can you see what happens next.”