I think it's some of both. He lets the phone lady have phone sex with him, he dresses the way Nutmeg wants, various other sexual encounters happen while he just sits back and lets them happen. He doesn't get mad at May for locking him in the well, etc. I'd definitely call him passive a lot of the time. But also agreeable.

He may be other things in addition to passive, but I would definitely use the word passive as ONE of the adjectives I'd use in describing Toru. Although he does take action at certain times, he lets things happen to him quite a bit. I just was reading where he finds Creta naked, next to him in bed. He basicially does nothing about this situation but cover her with a quilt. Then he falls asleep again on the couch. Then they have this very odd conversation over breakfast and Toru that is completely unlike any conversation I've ever had. So very accepting to her odd story of showing up at his house sans clothes.

It's almost oas if he passivly accepts anything that happens in his life, no matter how odd, shocking or strange. He just acknowledges the fact that these things are odd or shocking but doesn't seem to actually react in any assertive way to these things.

This reminds me of the convo he had with May where she says that some things are just weird because they are supposed to be weird. That if her parents put macaroni in the microwave and ravioli came out (or something like that) they would just assume that they put the wrong thing in, when really the macaroni had changed into ravioli. Toru is the opposite, it seems.

Okay, I finally got to the scene I was hoping a second read would make more illucidating - the boy watching the two men bury a cat/infant body - and I still wonder:

Is that Mr. Honda as a child, his ability to hear the wind-up bird a telling of his own connection with the other world?

Or is it a moment in Toru's childhood, or Noboru's, or maybe even foreshadowing of Cinnamon's? Perhaps it is/can be of any or all of them?

Is the house the Miywaki's place, and is the act before the war which defiled the place and brought bad luck to those who lived there? Or was it the acts of war that ultimately blocked the flow of the well?

And who are the two men, one sort of like the boy's father - the other tall in a hat. Having read Kafka on the shore, I got chills thinking it was foreshadowing of Johnny Walker - especially if the body was that of a cat

I always thought it was Cinnamon. I assumed the reason he no longer talked was because a large portion of him got stuck in that world. Thus getting back in bed and seeing that he was already there.

Yeah, definitely Cinnamon. The morning muteness + the appearance of his Wind Up Bird Chronicles on the computer confirm that for me.