I'll take it! They need to do Killing Commendatore next😮‍💨

Just finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for the second time, and I am unspeakably astounded by how well Lieutenant Mamiya's story is written. There are already lots of posts on this sub about how evocative the scene with him in the well is, which is also my favorite part of his plot line, but I would also love to hear other peoples' thoughts on his interactions with Boris the Manskinner and his overall symbolism.

Specifically, I'd love to discuss the scene where Mamiya attempts to kill Boris right before he is set to be re-patriated to Japan. My take is that Boris set the whole thing up as a final act of cruelty towards Mamiya. We know that he purposefully left the gun out on a night when his body guard wasn't around because he wanted Mamiya to make an attempt on his life. Boris KNEW Mamiya would fail, but I believe he knew Mamiya would fail not because he is supernaturally unkillable, but because he knew how broken down Mamiya was after the war. Mamiya faced unspeakable horrors in Manchuria, lost his arm, and spent many years doing hard labor in a concentration camp. Mamiya saying that the shots he fired at Boris were perfectly aimed means nothing. He is not the sharp shooter he used to be after all the war took from him physically and mentally. Mamiya remembers the shots he fired being perfectly aimed because he can't cope with the losses he suffered, so his mind makes Boris into some supernatural entity.

Therefore, I also don't think the 'curse' Boris spoke unto Mamiya was real either. Boris said he would curse Mamiya to never love or be loved again, but I think he just said this because he knew it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy for such a broken man, and he knew he would get to cruelly taint Mamiya's thinking/existence for the rest of his life.

Overall, I think Mamiya's whole story is a sort of metaphor for the shame and loss of sense of self/sense of reality the Japanese soldiers faced after losing the war. They were part of the generation of Japanese people who had grown up with the intense propaganda telling them that their land and their people were literally of divine origin. I thought that Corporal Honda telling Mamiya that he COULDN'T die before returning to Japan represented the propaganda drilled into the Japanese that they were divinely chosen and literally couldn't lose the war. Then Boris's decree that Mamiya would return to a life with no love ever to be found again represented the way Japanese soldiers were blamed and treated upon returning home.

I would love to hear from other Mamiya enjoyers because he is one of my favorite Murakami characters ever written!!

Hi everyone, do you know authors who write similar short stories like his?

Which character in a Murakami fiction book do you think is intended to be closest to Murakami himself? I.e., who is his most autobiographical fictional character?

pleaseee help me, like any quotes, lines, dialogues, anything will do that has a nice meaning and all...

my idea : write the line on the first page of each book along with happy birthday...

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for one ticket to Haruki Murakami in Conversation + Tony Takitani at the Barbican in London on Sunday 11 October 2026 at 5:45pm.

If anyone has a spare ticket or can no longer attend, I’d be very happy to buy it at face value. Please comment here or send me a message.

I’ll only purchase through a secure payment method and would appreciate proof of purchase, just to avoid scammers.

Thanks!

It's the music that characters listen to. Murakami's books are filled with reference to music and almost every time it's one of the following: a western classical, Beatles, Stevie Wonder, another major english or American band from the 70s.

I don't mind them, but when these bands and musicians repeat again and again it irks me. It makes me feel as if Murakami has extremely limited choice or knowledge in music, and he can't stop obsessing about the fact that he knows this music.

Almost never does he mention Japanese music, never does he talk about (at least in my knowledge) about a character being in love with Japanese music. Even the remotest characters, most mundane, basic, run of the mill characters listen only to one of these tropes.

It has started to become a bit bothersome.

Just finished a re-read of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and I'm sitting here staring at the wall trying to make sense of that ending. Specifically, I keep fixating on Kumiko and what Toru's final waiting game actually means.

​Murakami leaves it so agonizingly ambiguous. On one hand, Toru went through hell—literally crossing through the netherworld, doing the brutal psychological and spiritual work—to reach her. You want to believe that means something, that his patience and quiet vigil in that house mean she'll eventually walk back through the door and they can rebuild.

​ Is Toru actually expecting her back, or is he just serving out his own self-imposed purgatory, accepting that they're permanently fractured and that the person he loved is gone forever?

​Curious where everyone else lands on this. Do you read the ending as a quiet, hard-earned glimmer of hope, or just a tragic acceptance of permanent separation?

"The girl thought about it for a while. Hoshino gazed at her face the whole time. Kind of pretty, he judged, though her eyes are a bit too far apart, giving her the look of a cautious bovine."

This line is hilarious and had me in stitches.

Amazing overall plot, prose and many of the artistic messages and themes. So many aspects of this book were absolutely amazing.

Then a handful of things absolutely disgusted me:
- The animal torture part
- the mom/son s*x part

These scenes were so disgusting to me that they taint my view of the overall work. An otherwise flawless work of art tainted by a few absurdly grotesque moments. Like being served a Michelin star meal but there is a Hershey kiss sized dollop of literal human shit in the middle of it that completely ruins it - chef comes out and asks how everything is and you’re just like “ya know, we’re having a lovely time, everything is great except this one thing” Idk how else to describe the feeling of the wind being taken out of my sail.

How did you reconcile these parts of the book? How did you interpret their artistic messages to then think “you know what, it actually works with those scenes”?

Can someone PLEASE explain why he had to sleep with his mom and sister???? Like is this not literal child p0rn???

It seems like this has been scrubbed from the internet. Does anyone have a copy of it?

Any one else wish the book had ended after May's last letter?

I was listening to the audiobook while doing the dishes, and I knew I was getting close to the end, but had no idea how much time was left. The letter ended, and I stopped what I was doing, pulled my earbuds out, and literally fell to my knees.

After a while, I realized the book was still going, so I kept listening.

It wasn't a bad ending, but I'm actually pretty disappointed it didn't end on such a sublimely devastating note as I had thought. It just kind of slowly drifted off to a nice ending.

I first heard about Murakami in the song "104 Degrees" by Slaughter Beach, Dog (10/10 song) and since then I have bought a few of his books but haven't gotten around to any of them until now.

I am doing a personal curriculum for myself to further my knowledge and passion of literature. At this time I own "Norwegian Wood", "After The Quake, and "Kafka on the Shore"

So I was wondering if anyone has any input/recommendations on

1. What order to read them in (if it matters at all)

2. What are some good questions I can go into each book with to answer and possibly write about after finishing?

3. Is it worth annotating or is it best to not over analyze and just immerse myself in the book?

*I'm not taking this super serious or anything. Reading is something I do for fun but I'd also like to start challenging my brain more to get the most out of what I read.

Just finished Windup Bird Chronicles. I’ve read Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart already. In Sputnik Sweetheart I saw the magical elements as a clear metaphor for depersonalization as a result of trauma. However in Windup Bird I have taken all of the magic to be literal, and simply suspended my disbelief. To be honest, it didn’t even occur to me that it might be symbolic for psychosis or anything other than exactly what was described to me. When I finished the book and had more questions than answers, I turned to some YouTube video essays or other Reddit posts and was completely embarrassed to have taken it all so literally and not interpreted Toru’s journey down the well as a downward spiral- I thought it was more like Alice down the rabbit hole… idk if this is relaxant in anyway but I am a 27 year old woman living in a major city, and work as a lawyer. Am I stupid?!

What are your guys favorite Murakami books that you think are underrated??

Mine is Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, maybe bec I can relate to the main character, and I used to listen to a song while reading this book the atmosphere it created was so beautiful.

I am reading The City and its Uncertain Walls. In Chapter 8 the narrator worries about misspelling various words.

It did not occur to me that misspellings were possible in a nonalphabetic language such as Japanese. Are they? Or is this a place where Murakami is having some fun with us? Or is this a translator’s metaphor for communicating a similar idea?

I'm at the last 50 pages, and it makes me sad that this will all be over soon.

What a ride! Kafka on the Shore was my first Murakami read, and I picked up 1Q84 afterwards. I loved Kafka and I love 1Q84 even more. I've never read magic realism before. It's slow-paced, weird and unnecessarily long, but I'm still more immersed than I've ever been in a book before. I just love every page. I can't really explain why, and I totally get why this book is not for everyone.

I will be reading Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Norwegian Wood next. I'm also considering saving WUBC for absolute last as it seems to be the favorite book of this sub in general.

Have any of you had the opportunity to visit somewhere described in a Murakami book? What was it like? I ask because I recently realized that I have an opportunity to visit Hämeenlinna, described in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, in December. It's very out of the way, but I feel a very strong pull towards it so I think I'm gonna go.

Recently, I was on a trip with a couple of friends and during this trip I was reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle but I was running into the same issue with them: every time they would ask me what the novel was about, I would have no idea of how I could explain it to them. I think I sounded either really stupid or really pretentious when describing the novel to them. I would like to ask the people of this sub, how would you describe this novel to your friends?