It's easy to feel stuck when you're in your 30s. I think the luster of your career has largely worn off as you realize you're going to spend the majority of your time working and not making meaningful relationships with other people or even the world around you more broadly. It's also the beginning of your "mid-life" and you are likely coming to the realization that all of what you are going to be is the result not only of choices you have already made but of millions of choices that were made even before you were born.
It's a helpless feeling, I've been there myself and I've seen many of my peers there. This is part of what made the Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami such an interesting book to me. It chronicles a 30-year-old man named Mr. Okada in Japan at an interesting time. He has recently quit his administrative job after feeling the uselessness of it becoming too unbearable, his wife is becoming estranged as she continues engaging in her professional life and eventually disappears altogether (hardly a spoiler it's on the back cover summary), and his cat has gone missing.
Murakami is writing an existential novel and it's interesting - although I'll be honest it gets a little tedious - to see Okada written like Meursault from The Stranger. He seems listless; barely looking for work, certainly not looking for the cat like his wife asked him, and a good portion of the beginning pages is just detailing what Okada makes for breakfast.
There is a prevalent theme of water in the novel, both physical manifestations of it like at the bottom of wells (there is quite a bit of time spent in the bottom of wells) as well as meta-physical representations of life flowing all around us, a connecting force to us in the past, a flow of decisions that culminate in your current life and the life taking place before you. Okada knows that the Japanese occupation of Mongolia in WWII has a lot to do with the current blockage his life is undergoing and we are treated to some truly horrific - albeit brilliantly written - vignettes about various characters in that time.
Clairvoyance is a partner theme throughout the Windup Bird Chronicle, the idea being that life modeling the flow of water means some people are able to look forward and see the immutable future. Those who learn their future like the WWII veteran Mr. Mamiya are unable to change the course of the water and lead meaningless lives as a result, again stuck in middle-aged fear of life's mundanity. We follow Okada as he attempts to make the sort of drastic decisions needed to change the events of his life, a journey that takes him in the past, down possible other futures and the various tributaries, swamps, and rivulets that his path may take him. It's worth noting that the novel's villain is someone who can control the flow very well, rising in his political and academic career; cast as a completely vile and insufferable person.
World War II makes an interesting generational juxtaposition as well. I'm not very certain about the cultural view 1980s (when the novel is set) Japan has towards World War II, but if it's anything like the US, and there are some things in this novel that imply this is the case, then WWII is the last generation of men who did anything great. In my country, we call this generation the Greatest Generation. Japan obviously committed some striking atrocities during the time, but atrocities were also brought upon them by the Soviets and of course the US. The horrors explored in this novel are among its best-written parts, punctuating reminders through an otherwise pretty languid story of the horrific violence that came before.
These vignettes are something this novel desperately needed. I think the sort of "lost in translation" lost guy in his 30s who meets a manic pixie dreamgirl who prompts him to take control of his life is really overwrought and pretty outdated. I'm sure if I read this 25 years ago I would have thought it was great, but I think we're past that now. Largely because I'd like to think we're past the point of thinking that women - and especially young girls - are not props for the self-discovery journey of very sad men. However the war scenes are vivid enough to cancel out some of the more annoying dream sequences, the tale of Mr. Mamiya is so haunting and reviling that it removes any stain from the Wind Up Bird Chronicle that would mark it as a cute novel. In fact, I would argue this makes the novel worth reading at all.
