The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle ★

my thoughts - really really good depiction of losing touch with reality and feeling floaty and ungrounded - maybe bc i get this ungrounded feeling often (being alone for too long, reading a book into the night, being awake too late) - it did all come together in the end which i didn't remember from other murakami books isolation and stagnation -> detachment from reality, twisted and debased - may kasahara -> thinking too much, doing nothing in the house, lack of feeling or processing for the motorcycle boy who died vs going to work in the wig factory, keeping hands busy, being around other girls (even though she doesn't feel in the same boat as them) - feeling warm and happy about small things like visiting the duck people - her bit about how her parents are people who make instant rice pudding and get rice pudding, but sometimes she makes instant rice pudding and get potato gratin, and how if this happened to her parents they would say "oh i must have used the wrong pouch" - sequence of events do not seem to follow cause or effect - things just seem to happen without rhyme or reason - MC -> quit his job, alone around the house, receiving strange phone calls + strange events that break the sense of reality, not interacting with everyone, growing sense of unreality and purposeless that the reader feels too - things would happen in his life without reason (cat leaves, malta kano, empty present from mr honda, mark on cheek, following someone from the station and beating them up with baseball bat) - at the end - "bring kumiko home to place where alarm clocks ring in the morning" - cat comes back after a year -> warm, solid presence on MC's lap after months of represents connection and solidity with outside world - sometimes you have to stop thinking in order to do necessary things - lieutenant mamiya -> "imagination is the worst thing you can have" - MC imagines himself as the windup bird when he kills noboru wataya in the dream world - lieutenant mamiya life stagnating in the well in mongolia - theme of water - dried up well -> stagnation - may kasahara's tears at same time as well filling up outstanding questions - wtf was creta kano's part in all of this? - just as another example of noribu wataya's evil streak? - who is the hollow man? - what did the wind up bird mean? - MC stopped hearing the creaking when things got weird - what did the blue/black mark on the cheek mean? - dream of kid watching a guy with a blue/black mark bury a human heart outside his window under the tree at night - yeah what was up ith this in general - nutmeg akasaka's father, the veterinarian at the manchurian zoo had a blue/black mark - MC got and then lost the blue/black mark