The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Murakami's 1994-95 postmodern Japanese novel — Toru Okada and the missing cat

Tradition: Late-twentieth-century Japanese literature

Murakami's 1994-95 postmodern Japanese novel — Toru Okada, the missing cat, and the Manchurian past

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Nejimakidori Kuronikuru) is Haruki Murakami's 1994-95 postmodern Japanese novel (originally three volumes in Japanese; published in English as one volume in 1997). Toru Okada, an unemployed Tokyo paralegal, searches for his missing cat — and then his missing wife — and is drawn through a network of strange encounters (the precocious neighbor May Kasahara; the prostitute-of-the-mind Malta Kano; Mr Honda the wartime veteran) into Japan's suppressed history of the Manchurian Incident and the Khalkhin Gol battle. Foundational for late-twentieth-century Japanese literature and global postmodern fiction.