a visionary novel by one of Japan's greatest living novelists Haruki Murakami.</br></br>Product Description</br></br>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. <br><br>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.<br><br>Gripping prophetic suffused with comedy and menace <b>The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</b> is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.</br></br>Amazon.com Review</br></br>Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada.  He loses his job?? his cat disappears?? and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife  (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters?? including two psychic sisters?? a possibly unbalanced teenager?? an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War?? and a very shady politician.<p>  Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace?? while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach?? for the reader as well as for the characters?? yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. <I>The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</I> is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami