The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle A Novel

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 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 Chronicleis a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo.  The most recent of his many honors is the Yomiuri Literary Prize, whose previous recipients include Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe.  He is the author of the novels <b>Dance, Dance, Dance</b>, <b>Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World</b>, and <b>A Wild Sheep Chase</b>, and of <b>The Elephant Vanishes</b>, a collection of stories.  His latest novel, <b>South of the Border, West of the Sun</b>, will be published by Knopf in 1999.  His work has been translated into fourteen languages.