Tirdad Zolghadr was born in 1973 in California. He grew up in Tehran in Iran, England and North and West Africa. He obtained a B.A. Degree in history and political science and an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature at The University of Geneva, Switzerland. He worked as a cultural journalist and translator before working as a freelance art critic and curator.

He writes for Frieze and other publications and is a founding member of the Shahrzad art and design collective. He lives and works between Berlin and New York and teaches at the Center of Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York.

Zolghadr’s first novel, Softcore, which has been translated into German, Italian and French, was published in 2007. In this satirical, cynical novel, the narrator, a cosmopolitan, art-minded individual, like the author himself, is an opportunistic young Iranian man returning to Tehran after graduating from Yale University in the U.S.A. He has a great plan for re-opening the family restaurant and cocktail bar, the Promessa, closed in 1978, during the Iranian Islamic revolution. He is ambitious and has in mind to transform, the Promessa, into a space for art exhibitions, fashion venues, workshops, film sets, corporate receptions and dance parties.

The narrator is part of the international art world and his most important mentor and muse is Stella, who he met ten years back in the U.S.A. She is always behind him electronically, telling him what to do. She is a German historian, specialised in postwar art brut while being a spy at the same time but he is unaware of it.

The novel takes a different path when the main protagonist is caught by the police and jailed for innocently photographing the Tehran neon orange flower stand, which happens to be near the Revolutionary Courthouse. Being a polyglot and widely travelled, he is asked by the police to become their spy or bear the consequence of refusal. From now on he is thrown into the treacherous world of conspiracy and deceit.

An original glimpse into modern cultural Iran, a contrast with the serious, conservative religious state of the mollahs. Tehran is depicted as an important international crossroad, but unfortunately there are some other interesting topics and opportunities which the author has missed, like elaborating more deeply about life in Tehran, the contrast between the regime now and during the Shah’s reign as well as to what extent people are coping and what are the authorities’ views on the arts today, etc…

Alas, taken as a whole, this is an obscure, unbalanced, pretentious, unconvincing novel. It is unstructured, irritably overdone with unnecessary name dropping of all sorts of products as well as names of rock and roll stars, poets and artists, ad nauseum. The characters are one-dimensional, incongruous and unsympathetic. They evolve haphazardly throughout the story which makes it difficult to follow the turn of events and confuses the reader. If the author intended to write an original novel he strayed from his target.

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Haruki Murakami, one of Japan’s most famous and acclaimed contemporary writers, was born in Kyoto in 1949 but grew up in Kobe. His parents were both teachers of Japanese literature. He majored in theatre arts from Tokyo’s Waseda University in 1975.

Since his childhood, Murakami has always been influenced by Western culture and literature and loved classical and jazz music to the extent that while still at university, he opened his coffee/jazz bar, “Peter Cat”, with Yoko, his university mate, who later became his wife. He ran the bar from 1974 to 1981 and sold it when he started earning his living from writing.

Haruki Murakami became a keen marathon runner in his thirties and in 2008 wrote a non fiction about it called : What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

Haruki Murakami is a translator of books from English into Japanese, a novelist, who also writes non fiction, short stories and essays.

In 2006 Murakami received the Franz Kafka prize from the Czech Republic for his novel, Kafka On The Shore and won the Yomiuri Prize for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, published in Japanese in 1995 and in English in 1998.

The title of the novel refers to “a mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring”. Kumiko, the wife of the main character, gave it this name. The protagonist-narrator says: “We didn’t know what it was really called or what it looked like, but that didn’t bother the wind-up bird. Every day it would come to the stand of trees in our neighbourhood and wind the spring of our quiet little world. An ominous cry.

Toru Okada, the main character, was also called Mr. Wind-Up Bird by May Kasahara, his eccentric, insubordinate, adolescent, death-obsessed neighbour.

Toru Okada is a young, unemployed married man in his early thirties, without ambitions, who is having problems finding his way in life. His quiet existence topple’s over when his cat, Noboru Wataya, named after the evil brother-in-law he abhors, who later in the story is named Mackerel, disappears and his wife, Kumiko, the bread winner of the couple, leaves him for no apparent reason. Pandora’s box is now wide open. There is a strange succession of happenings; people start coming his way with their bizarre stories and predictions followed by enigmatic occurrences and peculiar persons. Their stories or fates are sometimes interwoven to ease the plot by making it less complicated.

The procession of mysterious characters who start appearing and disappearing in Toru’s banal life are eerie. There is Malta Kano, who is a clairvoyant of sorts, Creta Kano, who was initiated by her elder sister and claims to be a “prostitute of the mind”, then there is Nutmeg Akasaka who is a clothes designer and becomes a medium, and her only child, Cinnamon, who becomes mute at the age of six. There is also Noboru Wataya, the malevolently weird and popular politician with diabolical powers, who happens to be Kumiko’s brother. And not to forget the odd Mr. Honda, an old friend of Kumiko’s family and his strange will and his colleague, lieutenant Mamiya, who is now an old man and was in Manchukuo during the second world war and his gruesome story while in outer Mongolia when he was captured by Mongolian and Russian soldiers and was forced to watch his colleague being skinned alive by the Mongolian soldier.

The second world war atrocities are described in detail in various parts of the novel, as is also the massacre of the animal zoo and the savage and inhuman baseball execution in Manchuria.

A world of Kafkaesque surreal events unfolds in front of Okada’s eyes and he finds himself fluttering between reality and make-believe in a very strange universe with a stifled, bewitching atmosphere. Especially that Okada is of a compliant disposition and lacking identity which makes him easily drawn into each character’s sphere. Like lieutenant Mamiya, Okada is going to experience the isolation of a dry well in a forsaken backyard of a deserted, cursed house near his home in order to try to get to his inner subconscious, search himself and understand things in the hope of saving his wife, Kumiko, and bringing her back.

Things start happening as he goes through the well wall in his “predawn dreamlike illusion in the well” and finds himself in a bedroom hotel. He comes out of this experience with a bluish black mark on his cheek which gives him psychic powers.

In one of his interviews, Haruki Murakami mentions that the subconscious is a subject of great interest to him, especially that it is a “terra incognita” for him. He also mentions that he is attracted to wells, not for going down them, but for looking inside them.

He goes on to say that he likes to write weird stories despite the fact of being a very realistic person himself. Maybe it’s a sort of an escapism from reality, being a “loner” as he typifies himself. Referring to his young readers, he says he hopes that his books “can offer them a sense of freedom – freedom from the real world”.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an entertaining rich story, abundant in intricacies and brimming with an outstanding literary imaginativeness. A modern fantasy tale that takes place in suburban Tokyo, a few years before the end of the twentieth century. Some parts of the novel are intense and others are perturbing historical scenes of the second world war, during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria.

Despite the untied loose ends, the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an easy to read page turner and a captivating novel.