The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami
A missing cat. A missing wife. Japan's buried history.
For you if
you want to understand Japan's relationship with its own wartime history through a novel that refuses to let it stay buried
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Toru Okada's cat goes missing. Then his wife disappears. Then he finds himself at the bottom of a dry well, and the novel opens into Japan's forgotten history — the violence of the Manchurian occupation, the atrocities committed by the Imperial Army, the way a nation buries its worst acts under layers of normalcy and forgetfulness. Murakami uses surrealism to dispatch from inside Japan's unresolved relationship with its own 20th century — the things that happened that the postwar economic miracle was designed to cover over. His most politically serious novel and his best.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Japan • East Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Japanese author
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
