Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Murakami, Haruki - Michael Wood (review date 11 May 1998)

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Michael Wood (review date 11 May 1998)

SOURCE: “The Roads Not Taken,” in New Republic, Vol. 218, No. 19, May 11, 1998, pp. 49–52.

[In the following review, Wood examines the metafictional themes of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.]

Fiction constantly concerns itself with the lives of others, with the lives that we are not living. But then someone is pictured as actually living them, and there remains a purer, more speculative possibility, which is the life that no one is living except as an act of the fearful or desiring imagination. Fully realized pictures of this second life are quite rare in fiction, for reasons that are perhaps not as self-evident as they would seem. Why (we could ask, grumbling and sturdily resisting fashion) would a world which is already fictional, already an alternative to what we think of as history, offer a picture of yet another alternative, except out of sheer artiness or a longing for complication, or a...

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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