The wind-up bird chronicle
[by] Haruki Murakami ; translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin.
- 1st American ed.
- New York Alfred A. Knopf 1997
- 611, [2] p. ill. 25 cm.
"Works consulted": p. [613].
Having quit his job, Toru Okada is enjoying a pleasant stint as a "house husband", listening to music and arranging the dry cleaning and doing the cooking - until his cat goes missing, his wife becomes distant and begins acting strangely, and he starts meeting enigmatic people with fantastic life stories. They involve him in a world of psychics, shared dreams, out-of-body experiences, and shaman-like powers, and tell him stories from Japan's war in Manchuria, about espionage on the border with Mongolia, the battle of Nomonhan, the killing of the animals in Hsin-ching's zoo, and the fate of Japanese prisoners-of-war in the Soviet camps in Siberia.