Toru Okada is unemployed, boiling spaghetti, when the phone rings. Then the cat disappears. Then his wife does. What follows involves a psychic prostitute, a teenage neighbor, a politician brother-in-law with something badly wrong in him, and a man who tells the story of what happened to a Japanese soldier at Nomonhan on the Manchurian border in 1939, including a skinning. Toru spends a good stretch of the book sitting at the bottom of a dry well in a vacant lot, on purpose. It’s his biggest and strangest novel and the war material at its center is the thing that stays with you. This was my first Murakami book—after this one, the rest were Kansas.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle