The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

It all starts with a missing cat. Toku Okada is a man in his early thirties, currently unemployed and living alone with his wife, Kumiko. When the family cat goes missing, his wife asks him to go see a woman with psychic powers so she can help them find the cat. The woman warns him that the missing cat is only the beginning of a much deeper and stranger story, and over the course of 600 pages the reader finds out how true those words are.

Other than the missing cat, the story involves the call of a strange bird, descents into wells, war memories of almost unbearable violence, sexually charged phone calls from a mysterious but intriguingly familiar woman, two strange sisters who call themselves Malta and Creta, dreams that are much more than they seem, a strange mark appearing on Toru Okada's face, and a mother and son that go by the names of Nutmeg and Cinnamon, among other things.

The book chronicles Toku Okada's life for a year and a half, and over the course of that time he meets a myriad of people who all have stories to tell. These stories are quite disturbing, for the most part, and though they are seemingly unrelated, one slowly begins to notice common themes uniting them.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is often said to be Murakami’s masterpiece. Personally I liked both Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore better. But of course this isn’t to say that this isn’t also a great book. It has the vaguely dark and surreal mood I’ve come to expect from Murakami. Also, this time, because of my previous experiences with his book, I was expecting most of the mysteries to be left lingering at the end. Perhaps that was the reason why I was surprised when some of the pieces of the story did fit together at the end. Not everything is answered, but the ending was more satisfying than that of some of his other books.

There was a scene in the book that particularly impressed me, and curiously enough I recently came across a very similar (though much less graphically described) scene in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Both books describe war situations in which the soldiers go to the local zoo to shoot the most dangerous animals, so they don’t end up getting loose with the bombings and attacking humans. This is one more unfortunate consequence of war that we don’t always think of. The scene in this novel was particularly gory, so much that I had to take a break at some point and only gathered the courage to keep reading the following day.

Although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book as an introduction to Murakami (but I know many would disagree with me about this), I still think this intriguing and unique story is very much worth reading.