
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel (Vintage International)
Description
A "dreamlike and compelling” tour de force (Chicago Tribune)—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.
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 one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.
Praise for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel (Vintage International)
“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
“With The 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 suffuses The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and draws us irresistibly and ever deeper into the phantasmagoria of pain and memory.... Compelling [and] convincing.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Digs relentlessly into the buried secrets of Japan’s past ... brilliantly translated into the latest vernacular.” —Pico Iyer, Time