The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a novel by Haruki Murakami. I've never read anything else by this author and can't now remember what prompted me to seek this one out. The "plot summary" at Wikipedia:

The novel is about a low-key unemployed man, Toru Okada, whose cat runs away. A chain of events follow that prove that his seemingly mundane life is much more complicated than it appears.

illustrates how difficult it is to say what this book is about. I prefer books with a consistent, fairly straight-forward narrative thread. That said, I didn't have any trouble keeping up with the characters and events. I was never tempted to put it down and found it a fascinating read. I had some trouble reading it, because a lost cat figures prominently in the narrative and our cat is still missing.

from the back of the book:

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

Kirkus Reviews concludes, "this is a fully mature, engrossing tale of individual and national destinies entwined. It will be hard to surpass." EW gives it an A- and says, "at heart this is an old-fashioned story of emotional growth covered with a veneer of surrealism." Danny Yee has a mixed review that seems to forgive the narrative problems because Murakami's writing is good. The NYT review has a header that says, "In Haruki Murakami's latest novel, postwar Japan is adrift, eating fast food and wearing Van Halen T-shirts" and describes the book as "a bold and generous book" and as

a hallucinatory vortex revolving around several loosely connected searches carried out in suburban Tokyo by the protagonist-narrator, Toru Okada, a lost man-boy in his early 30's who has no job, no ambition and a failing marriage.

Stephen Wu opens by calling it "a mess, but a glorious, addictive, compulsively readable mess" and concludes:

If there's any unity to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, it's not narrative, but thematic. Although it's hard to articulate, there are definitely underlying currents tying together the disparate pieces of Murakami's book; the book has a clear emotional story arc, even though the narrative story arc is scattered and sometimes distracted. And it is this torrent of emotions, dispensed in all-too-brief nuggets of intense story-telling, that stays with you long after this brilliant muddle of a book finally ends.