The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, first published in Japanese between 1994 and 1995 and translated into English by Jay Rubin, is widely regarded as one of Murakami's masterpieces and one of the great novels of the late twentieth century. The book begins in the most ordinary way. Toru Okada, an unemployed thirty-year-old in suburban Tokyo, is boiling spaghetti and listening to Rossini when the phone rings. A strange woman is on the other end. From that opening, the novel widens, slowly and then dramatically, until it has taken in a missing cat, a missing wife, a sinister brother-in-law on the rise as a public intellectual, two psychic sisters, a teenage girl living next door, an old veteran's harrowing memories of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and a dry well in which Toru begins to spend long hours alone. Murakami works in the same modes that made him famous, jazz, cooking, loneliness, surreal dream logic, but here the stakes are larger than usual, and the long shadow of Japanese twentieth-century history runs through the book's final third. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is patient, strange, and mournful, and it remains the novel many of his readers consider his finest single work.
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What you might want to know about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Toru Okada has just left his job at a Tokyo law firm when his cat goes missing, and a strange woman calls his apartment with a long sexual question. His wife Kumiko vanishes a few weeks later, and Toru begins lowering himself into a neighborhood well to think, where Manchurian war stories find him.
Yes. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is around 600 pages with multiple narrators, dream sequences, and an open structure that does not resolve neatly. It is Murakami's most ambitious novel alongside 1Q84.
Yes. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, one of Japan's most prestigious literary awards. It is widely considered Haruki Murakami's masterpiece.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was written by Haruki Murakami, published in 1994.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a standalone novel by Haruki Murakami, not part of a series.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.