The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (ねじまき鳥クロニクル, Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru) (ISBN 0679775439) is a novel by Haruki Murakami. It is about a low key unemployed man, Toru Okada, whose cat disappears. This triggers a chain of events that proves that his seemingly mundane monotonous life is much more complicated than it appears. Also examined in the novel is the Manchukuo episode of World War II and its place in Japanese history. Excerpts were published in The New Yorker. The American translation was published in 1998.

Main Characters

While this book has many major and minor characters, these are among the most important:

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• Toru Okada: The narrator, Toru is a passive and often apathetic young man living in suburban Japan. He is Kumiko's husband, and is also notorious for following the orders or wishes of others. He is, essentially, the embodiment of passivity - and he's unemployed to boot.
• Kumiko Okada: Kumiko is Toru's wife, and is the more autonomous of the two. She, during essentially all of the novel, is the only one between her and Toru to have a job (which happens to be in the publishing business).
• Noboru Wataya: Noburu is Kumiko's older brother, and can be considered mediagenic. The public loves him, as such, but Toru can't stand him. Noboru is a politician and has no concievable personal life (at least, none that anybody knows about). He is said to be constantly putting on a mask - he is all style, and no substance.
• May Kasahara: May is a young girl who should be in school, but, by choice, is not. Toru and May carry on a fairly constant exchange throughout a good deal of the novel and, when May is not present, she writes to him. Their conversations are often bizarre and revolve around death and deterioration of the human life. Even more bizarre, however, is the cheerful and decidedly un-serious air with which these conversations take place.
• Malta Kano: A medium of sorts who changed her name after living on the island of Malta for some time. She is enlisted by Kumiko to help the Okadas find their cat.
• Creta Kano: Malta's younger sister and apprentice-of-sorts, she considers herself to be a "prostitute of the mind."