The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle represents a formidable work of nuclear literature – despite not a single use of the word “nuclear.” From horrific sights witnessed on a clandestine mission behind enemy lines in pre-war Manchuria, to a procession of oddball personalities whose preoccupation with the occult borders on the bizarre in 1980s Tokyo, the story sears images into the minds of readers – images of the violent, the uncanny, and the otherworldly. Though the novel mostly avoids any direct confrontation with the atom bomb, Japanese author Haruki Murakami uses stylistic tools to fashion a figurative weapon of metaphorical destruction that shares much in common with its literal counterparts used in the Pacific theatre during World War II. This unconventional way of reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle reclassifies the novel into a special category of nuclear literature that Daniel Cordle distinguishes from “genre fiction explicitly about nuclear war or its aftermath” (2). Such literary treatments of nuclear issues “reveal the nuclear context as part of the lived experience of ordinary life” (6). But unlike the examples that typify this category, “in which the threat of nuclear war provides an assumed, but largely suppressed, background to the central narrative concerns,” in Murakami’s novel it isthe persistent psychological threat from a nuclear war in the characters’ past that places it within the genre of nuclear literature (Cordle 7).
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