Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.
This was my fourth Murakami novel, and while I really loved it, [book:Hardboiled Wonderland] still remains my favorite. Although both novels are dreamlike and airy, Hardboiled benefited from a solid structure. Wind-up Bird Chronicle wanders on and on and on, gaining and losing characters without much explanation. As with all Murakami's novels, this book is not for anyone who requires their fiction to be grounded in reality. To get the most out of it, you really just have to be willing to follow it wherever it goes, analyzing what you can and accepting that half of it is just going to be a big question mark.
Reading updates
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20 September, 2008:
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20 September, 2008:
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