Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1999, Harvill Press)
Paperback, 613 pages
English language
Published May 6, 1999 by Harvill Press.
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. (source)
This enchanting saga will have you feeling like you're at the bottom of deep well
Weird and brilliant, the book constantly tempts you into decoding it’s meaning, and then immediately pulls the rug out from under your mind-feet.
I also felt like I needed a giant white board to track the seemingly endless inter-connections, parallels, and metaphors, but I’m not sure a large enough white board exists, and even if it did I’d probably just end up with a giant mess of ideas rendered less beautiful than the novel itself. All that said, his writing about female sexuality is weird and deeply uncomfortable.
