The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami

Random House, Oct 10, 2011 - Fiction - 624 pages

Toru Okada's cat has disappeared.

His wife is growing more distant every day.

Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving.

As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.

** Murakami’s new novel is coming **

COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE

'The reason why death had such a hold on Tsukuru Tazaki was clear. One day his four closest friends, the friends he’d known for a long time, announced that they did not want to see him, or talk with him, ever again'

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Algybama - LibraryThing

Not easy to describe or summarize. An extremely spontaneous plot that doesn't bother to explain the connections and causal relationships between events and people. Very entertaining in parts, dull in ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - banjo123 - LibraryThing

I LOVED this book. I listened to about half on audio--great reading by Rupert Degas--and read the rest, finishing it in a burst of compulsive reading last night. And, wow, Murakami has a strange mind ...

About the author

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
• Author: Haruki Murakami
• Translated by: Jay Rubin
• Publisher: Random House, 2011
• ISBN: 1446499103, 9781446499108
• Length: 624 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary; Fiction / Magical Realism