But look at the whole, and Wind-Up confirms the Norman Mailer principle: The birth of a great journalist is often paralleled by the death of a novelist. Murakami lets the narrative lines, so carefully laid, snap; you're suspended midair, your tender attentions scattered to the winds. You gulp, tell yourself you can transcend the Aristotelian unities, and would move on if Murakami allowed you to. But he does not. In what is either a belated acknowledgment of your investment--and his own--or, less likely, a more directly subversive move, he starts reeling in the lines about 100 pages from the end. The obvious is manfully recapped, the bows tied in tweet, tidy trills. "Cinnamon's grandfather, the nameless veterinarian, and I had a number of unusual things in common--a mark on the face, a baseball bat, the cry of the wind-up bird. And then there was the lieutenant who appeared in Cinnamon's story: he reminded me of Lieutenant Mamiya [the war veteran]." And shortly thereafter, "Everything was intertwined, with the complexity of a three-dimensional puzzle--a puzzle in which truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth."

Back in Room 208 a few pages before the novel's conclusion, Toru encounters a woman on the bed. Ping, goes the call button in his head: "I think you are Kumiko. Because then all kinds of story lines work out." I'm tempted to give Murakami the benefit of the doubt--to say, even, that his pat machinations force his readers into his crowd of wound-up dolls (of whom most died, remember, "plunging over the edge of the table"). But I'll settle for this: Murakami's story ran away with him. Too little too late, his impulse to tidy resolution testifies more to his discomfort with an expanded canvas than to his plug-and-socket skills.

Themes abound in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but the work is mainly fueled by chance and destiny. Throughout the novel, scenarios present themselves to Okada, situations that shift the path of his tale. As characters enter his life, they pull him into their world -- literally. He becomes a tourist within shifting interior landscapes, and through multiple eyes, Okada's dreamlike search for identity in the midst of chaos is revealed. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle uses various narrative digressions to grow into a historical panorama, and Okada's presence becomes an integral link, connecting all characters and chronicles.

From the bottom of his well Okada meditates on the nature of his predicament:

Nutmeg's father and I were joined by the mark on our cheeks.... He and Lt. Mamiya were joined by the city of Hsin-ching.... Mamiya and I by our respective wells -- his in Mongolia, mine on the property where I was sitting now. All of these were linked as in a circle, at the center of which stood prewar Manchuria, continental East Asia, and the short war of 1939 in Nomonhan. But why Kumiko and I should have been drawn into this historical chain of cause and effect I could not comprehend. All of these events had occurred long before Kumiko and I were born.