Nr. 3 (28) anul VIII / iulie-septembrie 2010 - ROMDIDAC

accompanies the odd moments when the psyche sinks into the underground.
Such a moment is illustrated in the novel by the surrealist story of the boy
caught between reality and dream, unable to distinguish which is which. In
a first phase, the wind-up bird stirs his curiosity, making him peer at the pine
tree from behind the curtains, in the hope that this way, he would see the bird.
Yet the cries of the bird stop, as a bad omen, just before an incident with two
men. While the shorter man disappears and the taller man buries a corpse, the
boy realizes that it might be the corpse of his father, whom he invokes as the
one person who would not believe his story and dismiss it as a dream. After
falling asleep, the boy is certain he is having a dream, yet shortly after this
assertion of certainty, he asks himself why he is dreaming of digging the real
hole and how he is to know whether the shovel is a real or a dream shovel. He
eventually digs up his own pounding heart and finds his own Doppelgänger
sleeping in his bed. As he wakes up, his inner self is changed to the point that
there is a complete rift between body and soul:
There was something about this one, he felt, that just didn’t match his original
self. A sudden feeling of helplessness overtook him, and he tried to call for his
mother, but the word would not emerge from his throat. His vocal cords were unable
to stir the air, as if the very word “mother” had disappeared from the world. Before
long, the boy realized that the word was not what had disappeared. 5
Ex Ponto nr.3, 2010
The magpie marks the point of convergence between the conscious and
the subconscious self, just like Rossini’s overture takes its place on the “foggy
periphery of consciousness”, since we often hear part of it in TV commercials or
it is familiar to many from the film A Clockwork Orange 6 According to Freudian
theory, the “id” is the layer of consciousness which acts as a repository of
primeval instincts and suppressed drives. Much of the novel’s key points
revolve around the use of violence, either with a “noble” purpose, with Okada
Toru trying to free his wife, or as gratuitous cruelty, as lieutenant Mamiya
recalls the tortures he has witnessed and been subjected to. But the main
points of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle gather around The Second World War,
which acts as a psychological baggage carried around half-consciously by the
post-war Japanese generations as a sort of collective trauma and therefore
exists in the same realm as Rossini’s overture. 7 The abandoned house, the
well, room 208 are also marked with trauma. Not surprisingly, while Toru
is down in the well, he experiences a dream in which he passes a familiar
corridor, meets a waiter who is singing Rossini’s overture, enters room 208,
speaks with an unknown woman and then goes back to the well by passing
through the wall. As he fights his sexual urges, an intense heat moves to his
face and causes his curative left-cheek mark to appear. The well and room
208 might pertain to different worlds, the real and the imaginary, but both
carry symbolical functions
Room 208 stands for a place of mutual understanding, sex, incestuous
empathy and violence, whereas the well refers to the centre of one’s
consciousness, to something that all people have in common. 8 Hotel rooms
are places that can never be tied to a single person, they are shared by
generations of people, just like the water of wells belongs to the community.
There is a deep-seated link between empathy and violence, as shown by
the two characters against which Toru uses force. Significantly enough, one
of them is a guitarist who attempts to derive empathy from the audience by
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