The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, first published in Japanese between 1994 and 1995 and translated into English by Jay Rubin, is widely regarded as one of Murakami's masterpieces and one of the great novels of the late twentieth century. The book begins in the most ordinary way. Toru Okada, an unemployed thirty-year-old in suburban Tokyo, is boiling spaghetti and listening to Rossini when the phone rings. A strange woman is on the other end. From that opening, the novel widens, slowly and then dramatically, until it has taken in a missing cat, a missing wife, a sinister brother-in-law on the rise as a public intellectual, two psychic sisters, a teenage girl living next door, an old veteran's harrowing memories of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and a dry well in which Toru begins to spend long hours alone. Murakami works in the same modes that made him famous, jazz, cooking, loneliness, surreal dream logic, but here the stakes are larger than usual, and the long shadow of Japanese twentieth-century history runs through the book's final third. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is patient, strange, and mournful, and it remains the novel many of his readers consider his finest single work.