synopsis:

Toru Okada, currently unemployed, married, living in the Tokyo suburbs, discovers that his cat has gone missing. He goes looking for it. Then his wife goes missing, and somehow, it's implied that this is related to the missing cat. And there is this mysterious woman that keeps calling him in the middle of the afternoon wanting to have phone-sex. There are a pair of sisters, psychics of sorts, with funny hats and pink or polka-dot business suits. And there is an empty well. And there's a gift wrapped box container of single-malt scotch with no bottle inside. And a bird, never seen, in the trees, chirping away mechanically, and it sounds as if the world is winding it's spring.

Mirroring the story in the present day is second story, a flashback reflection on the Japanese/Chinese front of World War II, the Mongolian stage, the brutality and horror of war, and it's lasting consequence on the Japanese psyche. This second story also has an empty well, and a wind-up bird. The connections between past and present are too numerous to list.

So this book begins with a search for lost things. It extends so far beyond this into the realm of the symbolic and metaphysical that It's a hard book to summarize.

on this book:

Murakami denies categorically that any of this writing has anything to do with Taoism, divination, or the mystical. Even so, he magnifies for us here the most minute and insignificant details, demonstrating that the simplest parts of our experience can have life shattering significance and symbolism in our lives. That the seemingly mundane events of living, things like folding the laundry and cooking spaghetti are under-laid with strangeness and depth bubbling up into our heads, old wells that we have filled with longings and fears. This book works on the idea that underlying our reality are great and terrible secrets, the idea that the interconnectedness of all things extends beyond places we are comfortable imagining into realms where synchronicity is almost horrifying and causality is twisted and indecipherable. We all progress through personal spiritual quests of sort, maybe even unaware of the significance and seriousness of the events we encounter.

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. If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' is a detective story, a history lesson and a satire. It is a book that unites Murakami's signature themes of alienation, dislocation and nameless fears.