Red Crowned Crane at Marwell Wildlife, England. Haruki Murakami's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle has within a myriad themes and subtexts. Just chasing those around would make the book worth a read. I find the wind-up bird particularly intriguing: a bird whose song sounds like a wind-up key being turned. The bird clearly puts in an appearance each day to wind up the world's spring and keep it ticking over. One day, the bird did not return and the world started to fall apart, with the real and the unreal becoming so meshed together as to make it impossible to tell apart. The red-crowned crane is in danger of extinction all over the world; its habitat is disappearing and so, although it has no particular predators, it will vanish quite soon; and yet this crane is the carrier of immortals as they travel to the afterlife: like the wind-up bird's disappearance made the world an unboundaried place of fact and fiction, so perhaps the loss of the crane will break another wall. And by the way, the first man-made object to pierce the outer limit of the solar system is out there moving right along, carrying a tape-recorder with our sounds and words...
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
April 2024
Categories
|