An Allegory of Return: Murakami Haruki's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Murakami Haruki (1949-) has made no secret of his fascination with the West and his admiration for Western things. His fiction abounds in references to jazz, rock and roll, European authors, and American brand names. For ten years, he lived abroad, first in Greece and Italy, and then in the United States. He even claims to have developed his distinctive style by writing first in English, and then translating into Japanese. 1 His deadpan fantasies, with their parodic echoes of American authors such as Raymond Chandler, have earned him considerable success in the West; he is, for example, one of the few foreign contributors to the New Yorker.