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I feel fortunate to have a long list of novels that I adore. These are books that are beautifully written and where I feel a strong personal connection with the characters and themes being presented. Perhaps most importantly, these are also books that help me to think in a new way, or to somehow broaden and/or deepen my understanding of our place in the world and our relationships with each other.

I don't always give the same response when people ask me which book is my favorite. It depends on my mood, and there is also some recency bias depending on which books I have most recently enjoyed. However, more often than not, I will declare that my all-time favorite book is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. This book made such a strong impact on my thinking about the world, about the ways in which people treat each other, and about the metaphysical reality hiding just beneath the surface of what we see in our everyday lives.

This is a very difficult book to summarize, with a number of disparate plot lines. I'm not going to attempt to write a plot summary or even a character summary. Instead, let me focus on what, to me, is the common theme that brings this whole book together.

To me, the overarching theme of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the cruelty that humans inflict on each other. Murakami covers cruelty in many forms. The first example is the cruelty that one spouse can inflict on another within a marriage. When the book opens, our narrator (Toru) is obsessed with searching for his lost cat. However, Toru is focused on the wrong question of "Where did the cat go?" Instead, he should be asking why the cat left in the first place, which is a harbinger for the impending breakdown of his marriage with his wife, Kumiko.

Kumiko's troubles stem from the inexplicable cruelty inflicted on her by her brother, Noburo, who is a slick, media-savvy politician, well-loved by the public, but also a sadistic abuser, especially toward his sisters. Noburo's abuse is cruelty for the sake of cruelty, committed by a twisted soul.

These personal stories of cruelty are paired with cruelty committed on a much more massive scale in the stories that are related to us about World War II. Murakami lays bare the atrocities committed by Japan during World War II. Even now, the Japanese government has been much more reluctant to admit its atrocities, issue apologies, and make reparations compared to the German government, which readily admits its sins and integrates instruction about what happened as part of everyone's education. Germany has done a much better job than Japan in coming to terms with its very dark past and making sure that these atrocities are never committed again. I really admire what Murakami is doing here in bringing the atrocities of the war front and center and forcing the public to come face-to-face with this cruel past.

Murakami doesn't restrict his criticism to Japanese violence during World War II. On the other side of the war, the Soviets were equally cruel. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the embodiment of this cruelty is Boris the Manskinner. The scenes with Boris are some of the most excruciating of the entire book and will sear a powerful image into your memory. This is especially painful given the atrocities that Russia is currently inflicting on the innocent people of Ukraine.

Beyond the theme of cruelty, Murakami also blurs the line between physical and metaphysical realities. Toru can only truly grow by entering the metaphysical realm. Murakami makes very effective use of magical realism here, as he does in so many of his other excellent novels.

This book has left a permanent mark on me. I feel like it made me deepen my individual self-awareness and also my understanding of human society.

It's very hard for me to describe how much this book means to me and how much it impacted me. I feel like it somehow deepened my consciousness and, in doing so, made me a better person in some small way.