Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. 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. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture.

The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada.

The wind up bird chronicle goodreads