Themes
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
Still in the well, Toru becomes disoriented. He is more separated from his body than ever before, even though he feels in touch with a deeper reality. He experiences time in an indescribable and entirely different manner. There is a oneness to it that he did not sense previously. However, despite the separation Toru feels from his body, he cannot help but feel intense pangs of hunger. The longer he is in the well, the more the pain consumes him. His thinking starts to break down into fragments, and he no longer has a coherent picture of his existence.
Toru tries to conjure memories like he did before, but the pain makes it difficult for him. When he does manage to conjure a memory, all he can think of are things that make him angry. Toru knows this is unproductive, so he tries to drive these thoughts from his mind. While down in the well and thinking about his memories, Toru realizes he regrets a lot of his life.
Toru tries to escape his physical pain in the present moment by conjuring up memories of the past. However, the past is also painful and difficult for him to grapple with. This is the first time in the novel where Toru directly expresses regret about how he has lived his life.
Themes
Eventually, the stress on Toru’s mind and body becomes too much for him, and he starts to lose control of how his bodily functions. He becomes increasingly desperate as he realizes that the air in the well is barely breathable at this point because May has shut the lid. For some time, he feels he will suffocate to death because no one is coming to save him.
Again, what started as an exercise to regain control has turned into a serious struggle for survival. Like Mamiya, Toru’s time in the well means confronting his own mortality, which is more than he bargained for when entering the well.
Themes
Luckily Creta arrives just in time and rescues him from the well. At first, when Toru hears her voice, he thinks it is just a hallucination. However, eventually, he realizes that she is really there and is trying to help him. Creta opens the well and lowers the rope ladder down to Toru. Toru uses all his remaining strength to climb the ladder and exit the well. When he reaches the top and looks around, Creta is nowhere to be seen. Starving and dehydrated, Toru returns to his home.
By the time Creta arrives, Toru cannot distinguish hallucinations from reality. In fact, it is difficult to know whether Creta is responsible for rescuing Toru from the well. After all, if she did help Toru, it’s odd that she wouldn’t stick around to make sure that he’s okay. Also like Mamiya, Toru had to climb out of the well by himself. Symbolically, this represents Toru taking control of his life and overcoming great mental and physical challenges.
Themes
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After returning home, Toru checks his mail and sees a letter bearing Kumiko’s name. The letter offers a straightforward explanation of what has been going on with Kumiko and why she left Toru. According to the letter, Kumiko had been having an affair with a man from work for months before she left Toru. The man is older than her and was also married. He even had children. For some reason she cannot explain, Kumiko felt a deep desire to have sex with this man. Before she gets into the details, she apologizes to Toru for how graphic her letter will be, but she feels that she owes him the truth and that her honesty will pay off in the long run.
Here, Toru finally gets an answer about what happened to Kumiko. It is not a coincidence that the letter came to him after his time in the well; the experience in the well was necessary for him to be able to process the letter’s contents. Still, there is something strange about the letter. If in fact it is from Kumiko, it is odd that she still refuses to face Toru in person. Sending a letter rather than talking in person leaves open the possibility that someone else wrote the letter.
Themes
Kumiko tells Toru that she was not in love with the man she had the affair with, but she could not help wanting his body all the time. She wanted the man more than she had ever wanted anyone, including Toru. Additionally, she tells Toru that for some reason she cannot explain, she never enjoyed having sex with him. She always loved Toru and does not regret marrying him; however, for some reason there was never a sexual connection between them.
Here, Kumiko identifies some—or perhaps all—of the gap in her relationship with Toru. For their entire time together, she was sexually frustrated. Given Toru’s sexual fantasies about other women and his near-affair, it seems like his frustrations stem from a similar place. However, he never voiced these frustrations to Kumiko as she is voicing them to him now.
Themes
Kumiko warns Toru not to come looking for her because he will not find her. She asks that he grant her the divorce she is looking for and promises that the proceedings will go smoothly. She tells Toru that she has a problem she is attempting to deal with but does not elaborate on what it is. She only says that it is something she has to fix by herself.
Ironically, it seems like Kumiko ran away from Toru because she is having the same problem he is. She feels there is fundamentally something wrong with her that she needs to fix, but she cannot say what that thing is.
Themes
After reading the letter, Toru realizes that the reason his sex life was so lackluster over the past few months is because Kumiko was giving all her sexual passion to someone else. After reading Kumiko’s letter, Toru again wonders if he ever knew his wife at all on a deep level. Given his complete lack of awareness about her affair he wonders if he only ever scratched the surface of the real Kumiko. While Toru is letting all this information sink in, he gets a call from Malta.
Here, Toru once again returns to some fundamental phenomenological questions, which continue to plague him. He is bothered that he spent most of his life with a person who he did not know on a deep level. However, whether Toru’s desire to truly know someone is even possible is up for debate.
Themes
