[In the following review, Ward discusses the moral issues raised by The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, calling the novel “a turning point” in Murakami's career.]

Haruki Murakami's English-language fans have read enough of his work by now—most notably the novels A Wild Sheep Chase, Dance, Dance, Dance and the era-defining Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World—to be able to recognize The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as something of a turning point. It is not just that this is Murakami's most ambitious attempt yet to stuff all of modern Japan into a single fictional edifice; it marks a genuine change of tone, a kind of mid-life deepening of purpose. His trademark weirdness remains, but where he used to be slick he is suddenly, surprisingly, serious.

It takes a while to figure out quite where the “new” Murakami is heading. A bulging brick of a book set in mid-1980s Tokyo, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle borrows its modus operandi from the magpie introduced in the opening sentence: “When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.” Rossini's opera is just one of many pieces of Western music cobbled together to provide the novel with a “score,” but the reference recurs so often its meaning is hard to miss: There is no sliver of life too insignificant for the magpie Murakami to scavenge for his book. The result is 600-plus pages of dogged, indiscriminate, yet oddly mesmerizing accumulation of detail, all of it stamped with the slightly dotty literalness of that first sentence. The question is, what does it all add up to?

A couple of hundred pages in, one is thinking that the detail must be the point: the bombardment of people's minds and spirits by sensations and experiences too numerous to sort out is modern life. Well, yes, but Murakami has shown us that before. Surely, if we keep reading, some profounder insight will emerge. On about page 398 the narrator confirms this suspicion (or hope): “All I am doing … is a mechanical inventory of details. But … just as the rubbing together of stones or sticks will eventually produce heat and flame, a connected reality takes shape little by little.” Luckily, the central story proves gripping enough, and the hero sympathetic enough, to keep us turning pages until that elusive “connected reality” begins to dawn.

The narrator, Toru Okada, seems unimpressive to begin with: Thirtyish, unemployed, a bit down at heel, mildly henpecked, he potters about the house while his wife goes to work. He likes animals, we note, and is neat, uncomplaining and thoughtful, but undoubtedly a failure in the world's eyes. He, however, is our man. And from the moment the phone rings in that opening sentence, he finds his hitherto numbingly ordinary life assuming the dream quality of Alice's sojourn in Wonderland. The cat has already disappeared. But now his wife leaves him as well, walking out one midsummer morning without even a change of clothes. Did her creepy politician brother put her up to it? Strange women and old soldiers with psychic powers issue advice: Beware of half moons and water. Our man starts having sex with the lady psychic's younger sister in his dreams—or maybe in hers. He befriends a misfit teenage girl in the neighborhood who nicknames him Mr. Wind-Up Bird.

And speaking of the neighborhood, what is going on in that vacant house whose dry well has such an interesting, half-moon-shaped double lid? A mother-and-son couple code-named Nutmeg and Cinnamon intervene; they're kind of psychic too. The cat comes back. Characters pop in and out of wells. The plot doesn't just thicken, it becomes glutinous.

In fact it all looks more complicated than it is. It helps to think of the novel as one of those shape-changing creatures that fairy-tale heroes must hold onto through a series of ever more terrifying transmutations before breaking the spell and rescuing their own true love. This, of course, is exactly what Mr. Wind-Up Bird does at the climax of his quest for his lost wife (“You want to take me home as Kumiko. But what if I'm not Kumiko? What will you do then?” “I'm going to take you home”). That the scene takes place in a modern Tokyo hotel room doesn't make it any less of a fairy-tale convention.

Murakami's branching, hybrid tale is a love story one minute, a detective story the next, a psychological thriller, a New Age-ish Bildungsroman, a sober chronicle of wartime atrocities, a meditation on historical guilt and more, in dizzying succession. All the reader has to do is hold on grimly to the bedrock that all these disparate things are grounded in—the narrator's fundamentally decent, patient, brooding sensibility—and the “connected reality” comes clear. In 1980s Japan, as in every other time and place, life is a medley of good and evil; our job is to sort out one from the other (though the smoke and mirrors of modern urban existence make that difficult), to recognize evil and hold on for dear life to the good.

The novel element in the book is the admission, in the form of long interpolations dealing with Japan's prewar occupation of China, that evil—and its twin, guilt—can have a collective as well as an individual face. Somehow, Okada realizes, the darkness he must face down is connected with dark acts committed long ago, acts that still go barely acknowledged in Japan 60 or more years later. Even if he doesn't quite see how, he recognizes that many of the pieces of the puzzle he has to solve “were linked as in a circle, at the center of which stood prewar Manchuria [and] continental East Asia.”

In the end, it's this underlying moral seriousness—the double imperative of choice and responsibility—that sustains the reader's interest in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. At one point the narrator feels so befuddled and depressed he is briefly tempted by the opposite image of human life, one he associates with the “wind-up bird” of the title. “The cry of this bird was audible only to certain special people, who were guided by it toward inescapable ruin. The will of human beings meant nothing, then … People were no more than dolls set on tabletops, the springs in their backs wound up tight, dolls set to move in ways they could not choose, moving in directions they could not choose. Nearly all within range of the wind-up bird's cry were ruined, lost. Most of them died, plunging over the edge of the table.”

In the light of Japan's 20th-century history, which Murakami deliberately brings within his novel's scope, this is a remarkable and sobering passage indeed. It is his great achievement to have given us, in this major work, a Japanese hero who refuses to act like a wind-up doll, redefines the nobility of failure and thumbs his nose at the very idea of fate.