The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel [Paperback]

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicleis a tour de force—and one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II.“Dreamlike and compelling. . . . Murakami is a genius.” —Chicago Tribune

“Mesmerizing. . . . Murakami’s most ambitious attempt yet to stuff all of modern Japan into a single fictional edifice.” —The Washington Post Book World

“A significant advance in Murakami’s art . . . a bold and generous book.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A stunning work of art . . . that bears no comparisons.” —New York Observer

“WithThe Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami spreads his brilliant, fantastical wings and soars.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

“Seductive. . . . A labyrinth designed by a master, at once familiar and irresistibly strange.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“An epic . . . as sculpted and implacable as a bird by Brancusi.” —New York Magazine

“Mesmerizing, original . . . fascinating, daring, mysterious and profoundly rewarding.” —Baltimore Sun

“A beguiling sense of mystery suffusesThe Wind-Up Bird Chronicleand draws us irresistibly and ever deeper into the phantasmagoria of pain and memory. . . . Compelling [and] convinl³J