One thing that is rather puzzling to me is their religious system. It obviously important, but it reminds me of Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance the way reality is so interchangeable with things that aren't necessarily feasible in reality.

One example is after Ezinma gets sick, Achebe writes about the story of Ezinma's birth. Ezinma is described as an ogbanje which, according to Wikipedia, is an evil spirit. For the Igbo, the word means, "children who come again and again". It is an interesting idea that the favorite daughter of Okonkwo is also thought to be an evil spirit. But I digress. According to the story, the ogbanje have these things called iyi-uwa, which according to Wikipedia again, is an object that binds the spirit of a dead child to the world, causing them to born again and again. Some of Chapter Nine is spent telling the story of the finding of Ezinma's iyi-uwa. At first, I thought (from my view as a westerner) that maybe Ezinma was being coerced into saying that she had one and to give the location. But the fact that it was actually found seems to contradict my reading of what happened. The nonchalant way it is woven into the story makes it less believable, to me at least, and confuses the action of the story.

Another example is at the funeral of Ezeudu. It is a very frenzied funeral, as Ezeudu was a warrior. But in the middle of describing the funeral, it is said that "Now and again an ancestral spirit or egwugu appeared from the underworld, speaking in a tremulous, unearthly voice and completely covered in raffia." These spirits seem to be commonplace, and so relevant to the reality of the story, but my confusion stems from the case at the beginning of Chapter Ten. A court case is being received and a point is made that, "Okonkwo's wives, and perhaps the other women as well, might have noticed that the second egwugwu had the springy walk of Okonkwo."