The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami"Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fictional writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.
Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon."
Genres: Fiction
Also by this author: Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood, Dance Dance Dance, South of the Border, West of the Sun, Sputnik Sweetheart, Kafka on the Shore, After Dark, 1Q84, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, The Elephant Vanishes, After the Quake, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Men Without Women, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running