The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Paperback, 607 pages

English language

Published Sept. 1, 1998 by Vintage International.

ISBN:
978-0-679-77543-0
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
39915729

View on OpenLibrary

View on Inventaire

4 stars (10 reviews)

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 …

25 editions

avatar for jeffmcneill

rated it

5 stars
avatar for urmaul

rated it

4 stars
avatar for clouds

rated it

5 stars
avatar for agaudeul

rated it

3 stars
avatar for ImboSlice

rated it

5 stars
avatar for DerMicha

rated it

4 stars
avatar for cochise

rated it

4 stars

Subjects

  • Man-woman relationships -- Japan -- Fiction
  • Japan -- Fiction
  • Japan -- Politics and government -- Fiction