Without work, Toru is free. But he is also undefined. Slowly the author strips him of other things that prop him up in life. First the household cat disappears. Then Kumiko disappears.
Strange things happen as Toru searches for both through Tokyo's suburbs.
He consults two psychic sisters, Malta and Creta Kano, who visit him in his dreams as well as in reality. Creta reveals to him that she was raped as a young girl by his wife's brother, a powerful politician whom Toru has always hated. Depressed by Kumiko's mysterious disappearance, Toru descends to the bottom of a dry well in the yard of an abandoned haunted house behind his home. Stripped of light, food and water, he stays there for long periods and thinks about things. On one of his descents, he has a bizarre, dreamlike experience.