Mister winder

Mister Aufzugvogel ( Japanese ね じ ま き 鳥 ク ロ ニ ク ル Nejimakidori Kuronikuru [= Chronicle] ) is a novel by Haruki Murakami . It was first published in Japanese in 1994/95 and a German translation in 1998 by DuMont Buchverlag . The translation was not made directly from Japanese, but from the English translation by Jay Rubin . He reports that he made several cuts in this translation work on behalf of the publisher. To this end, he explains in his translations that he corrects the author's logic errors. A new translation from Japanese by Ursula Gräfe has been announced for October 2020. It will appear under the title Die Chroniken des Herr Aufzugvogel .

publication

The novel Mister Aufziehvogel emerged from the short story written by Murakami in 1986: The Aufzugvogel and the Tuesday women , which Murakami picked up a few years later to write a longer story. In 1995 the short story appeared in Germany in a volume of stories: The elephant disappears .

In the Japanese original, the story appeared as a trilogy, which in the German edition was combined into a single edition.

1. Book: The Thieving Magpie (泥 棒 か さ さ ぎ 編, Dorobō kasasagi hen)
2. Book: Vogel als Prophet (予 言 す る 鳥 編, Yogen suru tori hen)
3. Book: The Bird Catcher (鳥 刺 し 男 編, Torisashi otoko hen)

While writing the novel, the author deleted entire chapters while editing because he thought they would not fit into the overall picture. He later used this as the basis for his novel Dangerous Beloved . Which was published in 1992 and thus before Mister Aufzugvogel.

content

Toru Okada, the narrator, is also known as Mr. Winder . He was around 30 years old in 1984 and lives in a single-family house in Tokyo with his wife Kumiko and his cat. One day the cat disappears and while searching for him, Toru meets May Kasahara, a girl from the neighborhood. Both are in an abandoned house on the same street. A little later, Toru receives a call from Malta Kano, who arranges to meet him in a hotel lobby. In addition, the couple has contact with the fortune teller Honda, who served in Manchuria .

Malta Kano, whose pseudonym goes back to a stay on the Mediterranean island of the same name , is also an esoteric and the sister of Crete Kano, who was raped years ago by Noboru Wataya, Kumiko's older brother. The Kano sisters offer Toru their help in finding the hangover, which leads to sex between Crete and Toru. Via Honda, Toru comes into contact with Lieutenant Mamiya, who was also stationed in Manchuria during World War II and had to watch a comrade being skinned alive. Lieutenant Mamiya was thrown into a well by Mongol soldiers, where the soldiers urinated on him.

Toru is spontaneously left by Kumiko and thus gets into a life crisis. Motivated by Mamiya's stories, he also spends several days in the well on the property of the abandoned house. There he reflects on his relationship with Kumiko and remembers how he met her and how she had an abortion a few years ago. May Kasahara helps him out of the well, later she also leaves the city. In an exchange of letters, she explains to Toru that she dropped out of school and instead works in a wig factory, where she likes it very much.

Toru learns from the newspaper that the abandoned house was bought by an unknown investor and that several suicides have occurred on the property. Meanwhile, after about a year, his missing tomcat returns.

During his stays in the city, Toru meets Nutmeg Akasaka, whose son Cinnamon is deaf and gifted. Toru gains access to Cinnamon’s computer and can chat with Kumiko there. She tells him that she has offended Toru's affair and that she has cheated on her as well. Eventually she asks Toru to accept her decision and stop looking for her.

Noboru Wataya is beaten to hospital by a stranger, and Toru comes under suspicion. In a letter to Toru, Kumiko confesses that she wants to turn off Noboru's equipment in the hospital.

criticism

“And you can really lose yourself in these 700 pages for evenings. One reason for this is Murakami's economic talent, which he unfortunately did not make use of in the construction of the entire layout of his story: an ability, reminiscent of Salinger, to draw the everyday life of that jeunesse dorée with a few lines: the carefully soiled sneakers of the unemployed Heroes as well as the individually wrapped cellophane costumes of his missing wife in the built-in closet. Or the infinitely deliberate wardrobe of wealthy Japanese ladies between twenty and thirty. "

- Stephan Wackwitz in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

expenditure

• Haruki Murakami: Mister winder. Translated from the English by Giovanni Bandini and Ditte Bandini. DuMont, Cologne 1998, ISBN 3-7701-4479-1 .
• Haruki Murakami: Mister winder. Translated from the English by Giovanni Bandini and Ditte Bandini. btb, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-442-72668-9 .
• Haruki Murakami: The Chronicles of Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Translated from the Japanese by Ursula Gräfe. DuMont, Cologne 2020, ISBN 978-3-8321-8142-0 .

Web links

• faz.net Stephan Wackwitz: Fresh, pious, early romantic. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. February 20, 1999.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jay Rubin: Murakami and the Melody of Life: An Author's Story . 1st edition. DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-8321-7870-8 .
2. ↑ The Chronicles of Mr. Aufziehvogel DuMont Buchverlag accessed on June 14, 2020.
3. ↑ Michiko Kakutani: 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle': A Nightmarish Trek Through History's Web. In: The New York Times. October 31, 1997, accessed February 23, 2020 . 
4. ↑ Haruki Murakami: Writer by profession . DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 2016, ISBN 978-3-8321-9843-5 , p. 75 .
5. ↑ faz.net