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Book 1, Chapter 8
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Reality and Subjective Experience
Free Will
Desire and Irrationality
The Personal Impact of War
Social Alienation
Summary
Analysis
After Creta leaves, Toru falls asleep while wondering what happened after Creta met Noboru. While asleep, Toru has a strange dream. In the dream, he is sitting at a bar where he sees Malta. He tries walking up to Malta, but she moves away. As he tries to chase after Malta, a man with no face stops him and asks Toru to follow him. Toru does as the man asks. The man takes Toru to room number 208. He lets Toru in and tells him that a server already delivered the whisky he requested to the room.
Psychoanalysis—a form of psychological theory and practice that Sigmund Freud popularized in the late-19th and early 20th century—emphasizes the influence of unconscious, repressed conflicts on a person’s behavior, with dreams providing access to those unrealized conflicts and desires. According to this model, figures and objects in dreams correspond with people and things in the real world, although sometimes the relationships are abstract. Toru’s dreams certainly follow this model, so it is worth examining the relationship between his reality and his dreams through this lens.
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Themes
Toru steps into the room and goes looking for the whisky. He goes to all the cabinet doors in the room and tries to open them, but they do not open. While searching for the whisky, Toru hears Creta call out to him. He turns around and sees that Creta is in the room with him, naked. Creta tells Toru that they do not have much time, and then proceeds to perform fellatio on him. Toru finds the dream immensely pleasurable, so much so that he has an orgasm in his sleep.
While some of Toru’s dreams are difficult to parse symbolically, this one is quite clear on the surface. He is attracted to Creta and desires her sexually. Like the conversation Toru had with the mysterious woman earlier in the novel, the shift to sex is sudden and frank.
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Toru’s orgasm causes him to wake up. As he cleans himself up, the telephone rings. On the other end is Kumiko. Kumiko is immediately suspicious of Toru because she thinks his voice sounds funny. Toru feels strange talking to Kumiko so soon after having the dream about Creta and is bothered that Kumiko notices his discomfort. Toru promises Kumiko that nothing unusual has happened and that he only sounds strange because she woke him up from a nap. However, it does not seem like Kumiko believes Toru. Before she hangs up, Kumiko tells Toru that she will not be home in time for dinner.
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Toru’s conversation with Kumiko makes him think of the time when he almost cheated on Kumiko with another woman. The other woman was a work friend who was about to leave Toru’s company because she was moving away to be with the man she was about to marry. The night of the woman’s going-away party, she invites Toru to her apartment for coffee. Toru accepts the invitation. While drinking coffee together, the woman asks Toru about his greatest fear. Toru says he cannot think of anything in particular. The woman tells Toru that her greatest fear is culverts because she got trapped in one as a child. As the woman speaks, Toru realizes that the language she uses to describe culverts is a metaphor for her fear of marriage.
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Themes
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After the discussion about fears, the woman asks Toru to hold her so she can recharge her batteries. She claims that she needs human touch whenever her batteries are low. Toru agrees to hold the woman and does so for several hours. The feeling of the woman against his body makes Toru sexually aroused, but he makes an active decision not to have sex with her.
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When Toru returns home to Kumiko, Kumiko asks him where he has been. At first, Toru tries to lie. However, when he sees that Kumiko does not believe him, he decides to tell the truth. Kumiko is furious when she hears about the other woman and does not know whether to believe Toru when he claims he did not have sex with her. Kumiko does not talk to Toru for several days, though eventually she forgives him. However, Kumiko’s forgiveness comes with a stipulation; she tells Toru that one day she will do the same thing to him. When that day comes, she expects him to forgive her, just as she has forgiven him.
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Shortly after Toru’s call with Kumiko, Toru hears May calling to him from the garden. She tells him she is about to go to work and asks him if he would like to come. Since he has nothing else to do, Toru says that he will. Together, the two of them head to a busy intersection where they fill out surveys relating to men’s hair. Their job is to survey the population and report their observations to the wig maker that May works for. While working together, Toru and May engage each other in casual conversation. Eventually, their conversation turns more serious, and May asks Toru whether he thinks life is meaningless. Toru tells May that life has meaning and that she should not be so pessimistic. In response, May says that most people are not pessimistic enough based on what she has seen.
