The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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. <br><br>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.<br><br>Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, <b>The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</b> is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.<br><br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>