jenmarie1313 's review for:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

2.75

challenging dark mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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What. The. Fuck?

I am so confused. This book is kinda like the "they had me in the first half, not gonna lie" meme because I got so lost around the ~60% mark. The first book and most of the second at least had some flow and I liked the flashbacks to the war from the lieutenant, but I got so lost after that. I'm guessing some of it might come from being lost in translation, but the constant switch up of times, perspectives, and general confusion with the "magical realism" made this hard to read. 

Spoiler time:

Why the hell do we need to explicitly go over everytime this guy pisses or comes? There's a lot of that. I skipped the zoo chapters because I just couldn't read the parts about the poor animals. The human skinning was not a fun read either. And the fuck was going on with the Kanos? Malta was there, but not? Creta had a baby that was half him, half the lieutenant? WTF??? Prostitute of the mind? Ex-fucking-scuse me??? And then the wall he could go through and the woman and the room and the beating with a baseball bat? Consider me lost. I just kept skimming at that point because it didn't seem to matter if I read or skimmed since I couldn't follow it anyways. And Kumiko is in jail, he wants to have a baby with a lady who straight up admits she killed her brother by pulling his life support plug (tbh, justified. Dude sucked.) and slept with "tons of men". YOU DESRVE BETTER DUDE! Also Ushi was the most annoying, rambling, yesman character and his inclusion was dumb. I get that Wataya couldn't just show up all the time cuz he's "too important" but bleh. Hated him. Hated most of these characters, honestly.