The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Vintage International · first published 1994 · 624 pages
A young man in a Tokyo suburb looks for his missing cat, then his missing wife, and ends up spending time at the bottom of a dry well.
Ordinary days of cooking, phone calls, and errands slide into dreams and wartime memories, and the strangeness builds quietly.
For a night with nowhere to be.
About this book
Toru Okada has left his job and keeps house while his wife, Kumiko, goes to work. When their cat disappears, a string of odd people enters his life: a teenage girl from the neighborhood, two sisters with unusual gifts, and an old soldier with a story from the war on the Manchurian border. Each search leads further inward, into dreams, memory, and darkness beneath the city. What lingers is the feeling that quiet lives rest on deep, unspoken history.