Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Murakami, Haruki - Lindsley Cameron (review date 1998)

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Lindsley Cameron (review date 1998)

SOURCE: A review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in Yale Review, Vol. 86, No. 1, 1998, pp. 167–74.

[In the following excerpt, Cameron finds The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to be ambitious in its scope and skillfully crafted in its style, but ultimately decides that the novel (“a bad good book”) is a failure.]

The Far East brings out the best in some, the beast in others. Oddly, this observation holds true even for Far Easterners themselves. This season brings four fictional takes on East Asia, of widely varying merit: Yasunari Kawabata's The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories, Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, and Simon Elegant's A Floating Life.

The Kawabata collection is, unsurprisingly, superior. The first Japanese to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1968, Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) was...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Naomi Matsuoka (essay date 1993)
   2. Yoshio Iwamoto (essay date Spring 1993)
   3. David L. Ulin (review date 4 April 1993)
   4. Brooke Horvath (review date Fall 1993)
   5. Jim McCue (review date 19 November 1993)
   6. Constance Markey (review date 2 January 1994)
   7. Elizabeth Ward (review date 16 January 1994)
   8. Alan Wearne (review date February 1994)
   9. Alexander Harrison (review date 18 March 1994)
   10. Celeste Loughman (review date Spring 1994)
   11. Celeste Loughman (essay date Winter 1997)
   12. Elizabeth Ward (review date 9 November 1997)
   13. Lindsley Cameron (review date 1998)
   14. Edward Hower (review date May 1998)
   15. Matthew C. Strecher (essay date May 1998)
   16. Julian Ferraro (review date 1 May 1998)
   17. Michael Wood (review date 11 May 1998)
   18. Tom Hiney (review date 20 June 1998)
   19. Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel (review date Spring 1999)
   20. Phil Baker (review date 23 July 1999)
   21. Lorna Sage (review date 30 September 1999)
   22. Scott Reyburn (review date 15 November 1999)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright