The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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 of Mishima and Pynchon.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

村上春树（1949- ），日本小说家。曾在早稻田大学文学部戏剧科就读。1979年，他的第一部小说《听风之歌》问世后，即被搬上了银幕。随后，他的优秀作品《1973年的弹子球》、《寻羊冒险记》、《挪威的森林》等相继发表。他的创作不受传统拘束，构思新奇，行文潇洒自在，而又不流于庸俗浅薄。尤其是在刻画人的孤独无奈方面更有特色，他没有把这种情绪写成负的东西，而是通过内心的心智性操作使之升华为一种优雅的格调，一种乐在其中的境界，以此来为读者，尤其是生活在城市里的人们提供了一种生活模式或生命的体验。