Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Been reading WUBC for about a year and a half; finally finished. As usual with Murakami, one is left feeling that this is a roman a clef, sans clef. One gets the big picture, if not the details, through the grand hotel-room speech at the end justifying the allegory: the legacy of Showa history is that thing, not quite like a to-be-aborted-baby, which can be drawn forth either for psychic healing or for a power grab. The details would probably require a knowledge of Japanese pop historiography and LDP machinations, circa mid-80's.

Without access to the specialist's knowledge, though, I am a little befuddled in trying to assess the jacket-blurbs that, quite naturally, call this epic. One does not need to endorse the idea that there can be a transhistorical genre called "epic" to wonder what motivates the NY literary-industrial complex to invoke the term. Is it reducible to length + history? One is tempted to speak of the "sweep" of a text in preparing the way for "epic" designation, but this is of course merely a substitution of one metaphor for another. I am reluctant to turn this into yet one more iteration of the poststructuralist game, though--it would be nice to come up with a provisional description of what is left to the term "epic" now, after the death of literary historiography.