The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I listened to the audiobook. The depth of complexity was disturbing. The violence of Japanese, Chinese and Russian life pre and post WWII puts the violence of 2017 into grim context. The author needs no compliments from me as he is so outstanding he forms his own world like Hemingway and Hardy but his viewing of the world is unique. Not everyone would enjoy this as an audiobook but to me, it was riveting though at times I was genuinely sickened by the violence. Such a different book from IQ84 and yet similar themes are apparent.
From Goodreads
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.
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 ageing war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria.
Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.
Three books in one volume: The Thieving Magpie, Bird as Prophet, The Birdcatcher. This translation by Jay Rubin is in collaboration with the author.