The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Toru thinks deeply about how one can possibly know another person’s essence. He tries to distract himself with a book while he waits for Kumiko to come home from work. Kumiko’s usual arrival time ticks by, and Toru grows worried. Finally, Kumiko comes home at 9:00 p.m. Annoyed that Toru has bought flowered toilet paper, they get in an argument about not knowing small things about each other after such a long time together. Toru notices that Kumiko is due for her period, and when she apologizes for her bad mood, she acknowledges her upcoming menstrual cycle. That night, as Kumiko sleeps beside him, Toru feels a vast chasm between him and Kumiko, and a foreboding picture of their relationship.

The next day, Toru cooks his lunch and the phone rings. The caller is a woman named Kano, a stranger to Toru who asks him if his wife is Kumiko and if Kumiko’s older brother’s name is Noboru Wataya. Toru confirms these details, but the woman hangs up. Later, Kumiko calls and asks him if Kano called. Kumiko tells Toru to do whatever Kano asks, adding that Kano, who is a medium, knows something about their missing cat. Kano calls back later that afternoon while Toru naps. They agree to meet at the Pacific Hotel. He tells her he will wear a polka-dotted tie, but when he gets dressed, he can’t find the tie and puts on a striped one instead.

At the Pacific Hotel, Toru scans the room but doesn’t recognize a woman of Kano’s description. He sits and orders, then a beautiful woman approaches him. Surprised that she could tell who he is, he is struck by Kano’s glassy eyes. She sits with him and orders, then hands him her card. Her first name is Malta, a strange name to Toru. She explains that she named herself Malta, after the island country, for professional reasons, after spending three years in a village there. Toru asks about her profession, and she tells him that she works in consulting on elements of the body. Confused and uneasy about Malta, Toru asks her about the cat. She takes out a photograph of her and another woman, her sister Creta. Malta tells Toru that Noboru Wataya, Kumiko’s brother, violently raped Creta. Noboru, it is revealed, is also the name of the Okadas’ cat.

Toru wants the conversation to end, but he pays Malta the respect of thinking through possible connections between elements of the body, Noboru Wataya, and his missing cat. Malta tells him that she doesn’t want to call the police or hold Toru legally responsible, but she would like to get to the heart of the cause of the rape to help heal her sister’s elements of the body. When Toru asks why his cat has left, Malta conjectures that a new flow has disrupted the cat, a sensitive creature. She doesn’t know if the cat is alive but she assures Toru that he won’t find the cat in his neighborhood. She asks for his hand and holds it. Toru feels the absence of warmth and life in their touch. As she prepares to leave, Malta tells Toru that he will hear from her again and that he will find his polka-dotted tie, but not in his house. 

When Toru returns home from the meeting, Kumiko tells him about work. Reflecting on his satisfaction with his home life, he is pleased that he “lived in a world that I had chosen through an act of will” (46). Kumiko asks him about their missing cat but is disappointed that Malta gave no details about its location. Kumiko tells Toru that she was referred to Malta by her brother Noboru Wataya. The Wataya family is very interested in clairvoyant-types, and Toru reminds her of their former spiritualist, Mr. Honda.

Mr. Honda used a hearing aid but was still nearly deaf. Although Kumiko and Toru didn’t believe in psychics, they took meetings with Mr. Honda because Kumiko’s father respected him. When Toru asked for Kumiko’s hand in marriage, the young couple were anxious that Kumiko’s wealthy and strict father wouldn’t accept Toru. But Mr. Honda convinced Kumiko’s father than Toru was an excellent match. The father paid for Mr. Honda’s sessions with Kumiko and Toru. It was essentially the one family duty Kumiko and Toru were required to complete to keep some semblance of peace. After Toru got into an aggressive argument with Kumiko’s father, they stopped seeing Mr. Honda.

Mr. Honda was kind and easy to talk to. One day, he warned Toru to avoid water. He spoke of the flow of the world, explaining that it is important not to resist this flow—to go up when you were supposed to, and go down when you were supposed to. But mostly, he would talk to Toru and Kumiko about his time in the battle of Nomonhan in World War II. Japanese forces had been fighting a Soviet-Mongolian enemy over some land on the Manchurian-Mongolian border. Nomonhan had been a brutal defeat for the Japanese; many men died, and many other Japanese soldiers had been ordered to commit suicide in the face of this defeat.

Later that night, as they lie in bed, Toru continues to think about Mr. Honda. He realizes that both Mr. Honda and Malta Kano had a relationship with water: Mr. Honda warned Toru about water, and Malta Kano learned the many spiritual uses of water in Malta. Kumiko realizes that she brought Toru’s polka-dotted necktie to the cleaners and forgot to pick it up.

Toru falls asleep listening to the flow of an imagined river.

Toru goes to the laundromat and retrieves his long-lost polka-dotted tie. Later, he decides to hunt for his missing cat. Although Malta Kano had told him the cat was no longer in his neighborhood, Toru feels an urge to walk around the alleys of his home and return to the abandoned house. He knows he could get in trouble for trespassing, but he feels a pull to enter the house. Inside, Toru whistles and looks around. He is interrupted by the teenage girl from next door, who finally introduces herself as May Kasahara. She doesn’t like Toru’s name and asks him to come up with a nickname. The first one he can think of is Wind-Up Bird, and he tries to explain the bird no one has seen but who chirps in the morning and winds up the day. May points out that Toru’s hair is thinning. She tells him she works part-time gathering data for a wig company and offers him the opportunity to join her.

May brings Toru around to the back of the house, where there is a dried-up, covered well. Toru lifts the cover of the well and senses how deep it is. They cannot see to the bottom, and they wonder what happened to all the water that would have been inside. They place the cover back on the well, and Toru goes home.

Toru had always been curious about Kumiko’s relationship with her brother Noboru. Born nine years apart, they had never been close. When she was three years old, Kumiko was sent to live with her grandmother in Niigata. The family said it was for the sake of her health, though Kumiko always believed this to be a pretext. To Kumiko, it seemed more likely that a feud between her mother and her mother’s mother-in-law was settled by sending Kumiko to Niigata. Kumiko had been happy in Niigata with her grandmother, but when it came time to send her back to Tokyo, her grandmother became erratic and depressed. Kumiko’s childhood survival tactic was to black out the months that followed. She had a difficult time adjusting to life with her parents and siblings; she didn’t know them and became difficult. She began to confide in her sister, though her brother was always a stranger to her. But when her sister died a few years later while still a child, Kumiko knew she would never find happiness in her family.

Noboru, the only son, was raised with affection and respect. Kumiko’s father is a formidable man who believes:

Japan might have the political structure of a democratic nation, but it was at the same time a fiercely carnivorous society of class in which the weak were devoured by the strong, and unless you became one of the elite, there was no point in living in this country (73).

Kumiko’s mother was similarly single-minded and cared only for the image of her family. Noboru faced intense pressure from his parents to do well in school, so he didn’t socialize with other kids. He married a woman in a union arranged by his parents’ but divorced after two years and moved back in with his mother and father. As an adult, Noboru is odd and disagreeable.

After graduating from elite universities with top honors and going through his divorce, Noboru published a successful but difficult-to-understand book on modern economics. The book launched Noboru to fame, and it surprised Kumiko and Toru to watch him become an intellectual celebrity. Toru always had an awkward relationship with Noboru, who made it clear he couldn’t care less about his sister’s husband. 

Toru is spending an average day reorganizing the home when Malta calls to inform him that her sister Creta will visit him at his home at one o’clock. When she arrives, she tells him that her namesake is the island of Crete, though she has never been there. Creta asks Toru for a sample of water from his faucet and a sample of water from a well. Creta is surprised when Toru tells her that there is a well in the neighborhood but that it is dry. She collects two vials of water from the kitchen sink and the bathroom. As she sets off to leave, Toru asks her about the missing cat. She tells him that her sister believes that the story of the missing cat is growing to be a larger story. Confused, Toru asks for more details. Creta says she knows nothing more but asks if she can stay and tell Toru about herself.

Creta tells Toru the story of her life. She grew up in an average family with two older siblings: Malta and an older brother. From a young age, Malta had a clairvoyant gift that initially delighted her parents, then frightened them. Malta and Creta stayed close and were one another’s confidants. Other than her relationship with Creta, Malta grew up lonely, unsure how to use her powers. In early adulthood, she lived in a commune in Hawaii, in Canada, and then traveled the U.S. and Europe, collecting water samples and telling fortunes, or helping to solve crimes when she needed the money. Meanwhile, Creta felt left behind and decided, at age 20, to kill herself.

Creta’s desire to commit suicide came from intense physical pain. Every part of her body was sensitive, and the pain was unmanageable. After breaking up with her college boyfriend because he couldn’t understand why sex gave her so much pain, Creta borrowed the keys to her brother’s car. Creta drove the car to the outskirts of the city, then accelerated with all her might into a wall. But the wall was less solid than she thought, and she forgot to take off her seatbelt. Although the car was destroyed, Creta was alive and, miraculously, felt no pain.

After Creta’s release from the hospital, she was in deep debt, owing three million yen due to the car insurance on the crashed vehicle and the damages to the wall she crashed into. Creta was depressed about this debt and thought about killing herself again. But given that her physical pain was gone, she decided to continue living, at least for a while longer. Creta couldn’t seek Malta’s guidance during this time because she was in Malta, unavailable to the rest of the world. Creta started working as a prostitute to pay off her debts quickly. But one night, two men she propositioned grabbed her away, tied her up, and raped her repeatedly in view of a video camera. The two men used the video as blackmail to get her to join their organization in which they would be her pimp. Creta became a prostitute for the men, and though she made less money, the organization made sure she met with relatively safe men in nice hotel rooms. Creta didn’t mind—she felt nothing at all.

Creta met Noboru as a prostitute. She asks Toru for another cup of coffee, but when he returns from the kitchen, Creta has vanished.