The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

<p>In 1978 <b>Haruki Murakami</b> was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel Hear the Wind Sing won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World but it was Norwegian Wood published in 1987 which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers were translated into many languages including English and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.<br><br>Murakami writes with admirable discipline producing ten pages a day after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races) works on translations and then reads listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music and they also seep into his novels and short stories providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 1Q84 and Men Without Women his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday of melancholy and humour continues to enchant readers ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.</p> <p>INCLUDES A READING GUIDE<br><br>Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life spent cooking reading listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table are turned inside out and he embarks on a bizarre journey guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters each with a tale to tell.</p> Murakami writes of contemporary Japan urban alienation and journeys of self-discovery and in this book he combines recollections of the war with metaphysics dreams and hallucinations into a powerful and impressionistic work Deeply philosophical and teasingly perplexing it is impossible to put down Murakami weaves these textured layers of reality into a shot-silk garment of deceptive beauty Critics have variously likened him to Raymond Carver Raymond Chandler Arthur C. Clarke Don DeLillo Philip K. Dick Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon - a roster so ill assorted as to suggest Murakami is in fact an original Mesmerising surreal this really is the work of a true original <p>INCLUDES A READING GUIDE<br><br>Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life spent cooking reading listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table are turned inside out and he embarks on a bizarre journey guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters each with a tale to tell.</p>