The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Toru Okada has quietly dropped out of the working world, keeping house in a Tokyo suburb while his wife Kumiko goes to her job. The disappearance of their cat is a small enough thing, until it becomes the loose thread that unravels everything. Soon Kumiko is gone too, and Toru's search for her pulls him out of ordinary life and into something far stranger.

Guided and obstructed by a cast of unforgettable eccentrics, a teenage neighbor, a pair of psychic sisters, a scarred war veteran with a horrifying story of wartime Manchuria, Toru descends, sometimes literally, into a dreamlike underworld beneath everyday Japan, where private grief and the buried violence of the nation's history bleed into one another.

Widely regarded as Haruki Murakami's masterpiece, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a hypnotic blend of detective story, war chronicle, and surreal quest about memory, marriage, and the darkness under the surface of things.