The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

Picking up Murakami is like getting home a new plant. You don’t know what plant you’re taking home, and the shopkeeper won’t tell you either. It’s a blind date. He hands you the pot with the seeds inside, and only tells you that this is going to be interesting.

So, you take the plant home and keep a close watch. You don’t want to miss a thing. You see the seedling breaking the surface and sprouting light green hints of leaves. It is beautiful, you think, but like any other plant.

The plant grows with vigour and vitality. Without the backbone of a single stem, the leaves elongate and spread in all directions. This is weird, you think, a weird but harmless succulent. This is until you spot something like a baby’s gums growing on the tips of the leaves. A baby’s teething gum, to be precise.

Your heart skips several beats. The gums and teeth are spouting all over, and turning the colour of flesh and blood. The pot looks hungry.

And the protagonist, Toru Okada, seems to be heading straight for the leaves, like an unsuspecting bug. Not so long ago he was listening to music and cooking spaghetti. He’s someone who lives for simple domestic pleasures like cooking, breakfasting with his wife, doing the laundry, feeding the cat, and so on. A perfectly harmonious existence.

But now his cat is missing and his wife seems strangely distant. As if waiting for this moment, a host of strangers start walking into his life, carrying their own attaché of stories. These stories — some times mystical, other times gory — feel like pieces of a jigsaw stretching across history and reality.

Toru Okada cannot tell right from wrong, reality from unreality anymore, but he senses that pieces of this jigsaw are buried deep in this pot. And the hungry leaves feed and protect a terrible secret.

Not before long, he’s bound to slip and slide into the darkness and breathlessness of the leaves.

You realise what you have in your house is a Venus flytrap. You realise Toru Okada is trapped in the leaves. You realise it’s only a matter of time before the juices kick in.