YMMV / The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

• Angst? What Angst?: Despite being The Everyman, the narrator handles everything that happens to him pretty well.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The two "What Happened in the Night" chapters. Aside from the Arc Symbol of the wind-up bird, it has no obvious connection to the rest of the novel (it's only very faintly implied that the child protagonist may be Cinnamon) and it's not even clear when or where it takes place or whether any of it is even actually happening.
• Complete Monster: Boris Gromov, better known under his chosen epithet "Boris the Manskinner", is a well-spoken, well-mannered NKVD officer and right-hand to Lavrenty Beria himself. In his chosen profession, Boris is responsible for the mass liquidation, torture, and execution of political dissidents, earning his namesake from his proclivity for having men slowly Flayed Alive by his silent Mongolian aide. Tossed under the bus for torturing a communist politician to death through the application of red-hot irons to the man's every orifice, Boris finds himself in a Siberian gulag and quickly starts manipulating his way into power, having people tortured and killed in giant numbers, even a seven-year-old child killed with his parents Forced to Watch. Boris finds himself confronted by Lt. Mamiya, a Japanese man whom years earlier Boris had flayed the comrade of and forced Mamiya to watch before tossing Mamiya to languish at the bottom of a well, and allows Mamiya to have a shot at killing him, only for the bullets to pass through empty air. Boris exits the novel with one final spiteful gesture, placing a curse upon the already war-ravaged Mamiya to live the rest of his days in misery, unable to love and unable to be loved.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: May Kasahara, Lieutenant Mamiya, and Ushikawa are all very popular despite being side-characters — another version of Ushikawa even reappears as a major character in 1Q84. Boris the Manskinner is also highly memorable despite only appearing in 3 chapters.
• Epileptic Trees: None of the bizarre events that happen throughout the book are ever explained. Not in any satisfying way anyways.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Towards the end of the story, the protagonist accesses a metaphysical realm where he kills the mental aspect of the Villain with Good Publicity, leaving him catatonic in the real world. It's almost like Tōru entered Wataya Noboru's Palace.
• Nightmare Fuel: The entire "Boris the Manskinner" sequence. His final scene in the gulag also counts, as when Mamiya tries to shoot him at point blank range the bullet hits the wall behind him and he subsequently implies that he can't be killed, before passing his curse on to Mamiya so that he dies old and unloved.
• Squick: You really don't want to know how to skin a person alive.
  • Noboru Wataya's incestuous crush on his older sister. Kumiko literally walked in on him masturbating to her underwear after she died. And it's heavily implied that he has the same sort of feelings for Kumiko, which adds a whole new level to her apparent captivity in the hotel throughout the novel.
• Tear Jerker: Oh so very many.
  • Creta Kano's entire backstory, for starters. First she was afflicted with crippling, chronic pain over her entire body for as long as she could remember, and then she was forced into prostitution by the Yakuza.
  • Lieutenant Mamiya's lingering trauma from World War II. He says that he feels his soul died down in the well in Mongolia and that he's just been moving through life as a ghost ever since.
  • Kumiko's letter to Toru where she explains that she left him because she hates herself and feels he doesn't deserve to be burdened with her. Their later conversation over the computer where she encourages him to forget all about her but he refuses to and swears to find her also counts.
  • The Japanese soldiers shooting all the dangerous animals in the Chinese zoo during the final days of World War II.
• Unconventional Learning Experience: The book teaches you a lot about the Second Sino-Japanese War. A major subplot is focused on the Soviet-Japanese border conflicts and the Battle of Khalkin Gol is prominently mentioned, for instance.
• The Woobie: Mamiya, Creta Kano, and Kumiko are the biggest ones, but Toru and Nutmeg also have definite elements of this.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: The whole book is LOADED with symbolism, especially in the narrator's dreams.

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