The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
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. Now with a new introduction by the author. 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.
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Community Reviews
Flirting between the real world and the dream-like state of another parallel dimension existence, following the protagonist and his grasp of trying to understand his reality. The search for a missing cat has never been so filled with adventures and sexual desires. I love this author but the length of his novels conflicts me as the storyline could be created into a short story but his writing just puts you in a trance enjoying his writing style.
This is the 8th Murakami book I've read and definitely in the top three for me along with Norwegian Wood and After Dark. The short of it is that Toru Okada is having some angst after leaving his legal job (I relate to that!) when things get very magically weird and his wife leaves him in mysterious circumstances. Interwoven with that is a bunch of truly horrific World War II stories from the perspective of Japanese soldiers in Mongolia, China, an...read more
The plot, through line, and character arcs in this book amount to one giant existentialist dream. Every page is dripping with phenomenological explorations of contemporary existence and relationships. The reader is not just an observer but a layer on which some of the exploits play out. You have to resist being pulled into the drama.
At every point Murakami blurs the line between dreams and reality. This duality is best captured in a line later...read more
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