These days, it seems like our new oddities are becoming more normalized from day to day. It was hard at first to keep away from others, but now a sense of panic is easily incited when even a family member gets close. Loneliness prevails even when there are millions going through the same situation. No one expected for everyones’ lives to take a drastic turn. No one expected for things to continue to get worse. What do we do when we are at the mercy of something greater than us? How do we cope? How do we take back control? These are some of the questions that Haruki Murakami contemplates in his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, published between 1994–1995. Though the novel is about 30 years old, it remains as relevant as ever. 

        Murakami’s central character Toru Okada had a very relatively normal life: a job he hated, a wife he cared for, and a cat that went missing. He was just like anyone else. Suddenly he quits his job, and a string of terrible events continuously unfold around him. Almost as if, just like us, Mr. Okada is stuck in a bad episode of the series called 2020. New strange people arrive in his life and now he begins to see a new side to the world around. He enters into another, more surreal reality that existed without him having any knowledge of it. The parallels of Okada’s new spiraled life really resembles the world today as more and more people wake up to the strange reality before us that seems more like a nightmare than it is a daydream. He meets peculiar strangers who always seem to know more about his own world and all the steps in front of him before he even gets a chance to breathe. In order to become more in control of his now spiraled life, and in order to find himself and his runaway wife, he must go along with the flow of this unusual world. The multide of difficult and uncanny topics are continuously covered by Murakami in his three part series. 

        Within this novel alone, Murakami discusses a wide range of topics starting from women controlling their own bodies, freedom to explore sexual desires, and even the corruption that fills media and government, but one of the biggest concepts talked about throughout the book is the idea of understanding and finding oneself. 2020 is a huge year and things seem to become more and more difficult as we are continually being thrown one curveball after another. The stress from this year alone probably aged many people by 10 years, but as we are still dealing with all the side effects of this year many are doing what they can to be responsible and isolate. During isolation many are looking into themselves and discovering themselves all over again. Just like many others Toru Okada is doing the same as he looks into the depths of a person and what makes a person who they are. An important question he raises is the idea that no one can ever really throw away our pasts or even the bad parts of ourselves. Without what we had or what we currently have we will only be left with an empty shell of a person. Murakami wrote a complex piece of work about 30 years ago and somehow it fits well in 2020. This work tells a story of a man forced into a strange world he never asked for and all he can do is follow it through just like the rest of us who seem to be stuck in the glitch of the matrix and who knows if there will ever be a way out again.