My Wind-Up Bird is an MFA Thesis turned Doctoral Dissertation that performs critical readings of Haruki Murakami's novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. A blend of academic scholarship and art-making intervene in all 607 pages of the text, interrogating the novel's diverse stakes, questioning the novel's flaws, and glorifying the novel's profound successes. My Wind-Up Bird physically enacts the imaginative labor readers perform as they transform Murakami's raw text into literary experience.