An ordinary Tokyo man searches for his missing cat and descends into a labyrinth of violence, dreams, and collective Japanese memory.
About This Book
A "dreamlike and compelling” tour de force (Chicago Tribune)—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. Now with a new introduction by the author. 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.
Who This Is For
Best for readers who want to be immersed in a world: mood and setting as important as plot. This is a book that asks something of you. Dense, layered, and best read slowly. It takes its time, and that's the point. Patience is rewarded. Plot-first readers may find the pace too slow and the ambiguity too deliberate.
Best Read When
Best read when you're in the mood for something atmospheric and mysterious, and a read that's slow and deeply immersive.
What It Explores
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle explores identity and the gap between who we are and who we pretend to be, loss and what remains after it, and survival and what extreme circumstances ask of people.
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