num_pages: 611
description: 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 a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging 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.From the Trade Paperback edition.
language: English
title: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
titlecomplete: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
characters: Toru Okada, Malta Kano, Nutmeg Akasaka, Kumiko Okada, Creta Kano, May Kasahara, Noboru Wataya, Boris Gromov, Cinnamon Akasaka, Ushikawa, Tokutaro Mamiya
genres: Asia, Japanese Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, Fantasy, Mystery, Fiction, Contemporary, Magical Realism
ratings_count: 273399
places: Japan, Tokyo
series: ねじまき鳥クロニクル
awards: awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize
category: the Translation of Japanese Literature, awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Yomiuri Prize 読売文学賞
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Dublin Literary Award
category: Shortlist
publisher: Knopf