Or, rather, he doesn’t think a pattern of cheating is enough of an explanation for her leaving everything behind one morning. The first to go is Kumiko, who says she’s been having an affair. But things keep getting weirder, mainly through a series of further appearances and disappearances. He also meets May Kasahara, a blunt sixteen-year-old who’s taking a year off school after a motorcycle accident. He heads down the alley to look for the cat, but all he finds is the deserted (haunted?) Miyawaki house with a bird sculpture and an old, dry well in its yard. On these hot June days, it’s an almost preternaturally still place, with the quiet broken only by the mechanical-sounding call of a creature Toru thinks of as the wind-up bird.

There’s a narrow alleyway behind their suburban Tokyo house that cuts between two rows of back gardens. And unexpected phone calls just keep coming, including from Malta Kano, a clairvoyant who foretells that he will experience “Bad things that seem good at first, and good things that seem bad at first.” A week ago the cat – named Noboru Wataya, after Toru’s hateful brother-in-law – disappeared, so he’s cooking himself some spaghetti and pondering his cat hunting strategy when he gets a call from what seems to be a phone sex hotline, except that the female speaker claims to know him well. Thirty-year-old Toru Okada recently left his job as a law clerk and has been aimlessly spending days at home while his wife, Kumiko, goes out to her magazine editor job. It all starts with a missing cat and a dirty phone call. It’s a hero’s quest through a baffling, mystical underworld. This is the story of a young man who’s become lost in his own life and is looking for the way back.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994), which I just finished last night, is certainly bizarre, but in the best possible way: it questions our comfort in the everyday by contorting familiar elements in the way that dreams do. I have some friends who are big fans of his work, but I always thought his fiction would be a bit too odd for me. I don’t know why I resisted reading Haruki Murakami for so long.

The wind up bird chronicle goodreads