The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle review

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle begins as a novel about small domestic disruptions — Toru Okada's cat has gone missing, and then his wife Kumiko goes missing in a different way. But Murakami's characteristic move is to open these domestic rifts outward until they become chasms between worlds. Over the novel's enormous length, Toru descends into a dry well, meets a series of peculiar people who seem to know things about him that he doesn't know himself, and gradually discovers that his unremarkable marriage was never what it appeared to be, and that the violence embedded in Japan's 20th-century history is somehow still moving through the present.

The novel has several major strands that don't obviously belong together. There are the meditative present-day chapters following Toru's increasingly strange domestic investigation. There are two extraordinary World War II narratives — one set in Mongolia during the Nomonhan incident of 1939, another in a Manchurian zoo — that rank among the darkest and most powerful writing Murakami has produced. There is a sinister political figure named Noboru Wataya who represents something about postwar Japan's accommodation with power. And there are dreamlike encounters that operate in the space where the living touch the dead.