The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Epub

English language

Published Oct. 6, 1998 by Vintage International.

ISBN:
978-0-307-76270-2
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OCLC Number:
1014249475

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5 stars (1 review)

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force—and one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II. Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/118727/the-wind-up-bird-chronicle-by-haruki-murakami/9780307762702

22 editions

Re-read after 20 years and it hits way differnt

5 stars

Weird and brilliant, the book constantly tempts you into decoding it’s meaning, and then immediately pulls the rug out from under your mind-feet.

I also felt like I needed a giant white board to track the seemingly endless inter-connections, parallels, and metaphors, but I’m not sure a large enough white board exists, and even if it did I’d probably just end up with a giant mess of ideas rendered less beautiful than the novel itself. All that said, his writing about female sexuality is weird and deeply uncomfortable.