The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

is a novel by Haruki Murakami. The American translation and its British adaptation (English) are by Jay Rubin and were first published in 1997. Two chapters were originally published in The New Yorker under the titles The Zoo Attack on July 31 1995, and Another Way to Die on January 20 1997. A slightly different version of the first chapter translated by Alfred Birnbaum was published in the collection The Elephant Vanishes under the title The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday's Women. The original Japanese edition was released in three parts, which make up the three "books" of the English language, single volume, version. For this novel, Murakami received the Yomiuri Literary Award, which was awarded to him by one of his harshest former critics, Oe Kenzaburo. The novel is about a low-key unemployed man, Toru Okada, whose cat disappears. A chain of events follow that prove that his seemingly mundane monotonous life is much more complicated than it appears. Also examined is the Manchukuo... full article at wikipedia