Popular Authors on SSMT Agatha Christie Alice Munro Ambrose Bierce Amy Hempel Ann Beattie Anton Chekhov Arthur Conan Doyle Barry Hannah Bernard Malamud Carson McCullers Clarice Lispector Donald Barthelme Edgar Allan Poe Edna O'Brien Edward P. By the clock atop the TV, it’s eleven-thirty.Īs always, join the conversation in the comments section below, on SSMT Facebook or on Twitter to the Short Story Magic Tricks Monthly Newsletter to get the latest short story news, contests and fun. If it’s that woman again, I’ll say I’m in the middle of ironing and hang up. But you never know, so I retrace my steps back to the living room and pick up the receiver. And for a moment I wonder whether I shouldn’t just ignore it and keep on going into the kitchen. I’m getting thirsty by now and am heading to the kitchen for some water when once more the telephone rings. And that’s quite a trick on Murakami’s part. The story never dictates its themes to the reader but invites us to analyze the phone calls and the phone callers as related entities.

The protagonist talks to the mysterious woman on the phone. The protagonist talks to his wife on the phone. I like the way the phone calls are placed together for the reader to compare and contrast. Surely, the confusion and incomplete feeling that surrounds this story can be at least partly attributed to the dreaded “excerpt of a novel” effect.Īs always, there is plenty to consider and admire with Murakami.

It should be noted that this is a variation on the first chapter of his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I have not read. Some of that creates a really cool consistency.

And it doesn’t feel like authorial commentary either but rather just the story’s corrupt soul.īut this isn’t the first Murakami story I’ve read, so I can tell you it draws liberally from his other work – the corridor motif, the ringing phone, the spaghetti. There is a casual sexual menace about the protagonist here that is unsettling. It’s kind of a mess, and the self-loathing isolation that Murakami spins so well into depressing hypnosis in other stories here simply feels boring and a little bit gross.

It’s not bad it’s just not that good either. It’s not that “The Wind-Up Bird” is such a bad story. This is the great Murakami I’ve heard so much about? This?!? If this was the first Murakami story I’d ever read – and there’s a fairly decent chance of that being the case for many people, given its leadoff spot in the order atop The Elephant Vanishes – I would be underwhelmed to the point of bafflement. The Wind-Up Bird And Tuesday’s Women by Haruki Murakami, 1986Įncouraging the reader to consider welcoming first page

Murakami the wind up bird