The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

About

Toru Okada's cat has disappeared, his wife is behaving strangely, and a phone call from a woman he doesn't know sends him down a well — literally — into the buried darkness beneath suburban Tokyo. What begins as the search for a missing cat becomes a journey through wartime atrocities in Manchuria, psychic espionage, a sinister brother-in-law with political ambitions, and the interior landscape of a man discovering that passivity is its own form of violence. Murakami's longest and most ambitious novel is a labyrinth of interconnected stories that moves between the domestic and the historical, the mundane and the supernatural, with the dream-logic confidence of a writer at the peak of his powers. A novel about a man who goes underground to find what he's lost — and discovers that what's buried beneath the surface is the entire twentieth century.