In Toru Okada's version, his wife Kumiko named the wind-up bird, the unfortunate sound of a mechanical cry which would follow him in his misadventures. Foretells for all those who heard the bird are not auspicious - we will know that ahead in the book. A Murakami's invention, the wind-up bird is a kind of invisible dark sorcerer specialized in characters who vanish and the (apparently casual) meeting of other characters. Demonic powers and their connection with the scars of the World War II in modern Japan are always present.
The wind-up bird - a delusional childhood dream or a metaphor for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki airplanes? The author seems to tell us that beauty can coexist with horror, dreams with reality, the lightness of natural shapes with the weight of mechanical and social gears, emotion with rationality, destiny with free will (the wind-up bird presages can coexist with a stubbornly open narrative, which annoyed some critics). Meanwhile, death is seductive, evil is ambitious - and fragment-built. Just like hope.
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