Description

Asia's most respected novelist now vaults in to the first ranks of international fiction writers with this specific heroically imaginative novel, that will be at the same time a detective story, a merchant account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World-War II. In a Tokyo suburb a 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 underneath the placid exterior of Tokyo.  As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre number of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-woman; and an aging war veteran who hasbeen 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 just a tour-de force equivalent in range Towards the projects of Mishima and Pynchon.