Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first
ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically
imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account
of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried
secrets of World War II.
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his
wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as
well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of
Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre
group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent
yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid
sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been
permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during
Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.
Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.
