When an enigmatic young woman named Malta Kano contacts Toru and tells him that she’s on the case of the missing cat, Toru suspects something else is on her mind. And he’s getting these weird calls from a mysterious woman who claims to know him. They have a happy life, but their cat is missing and Toru is out of work. It’s a powerful, whimsical, terrifying, and supremely odd book that is about practically everything you can write a book about. I may end up liking Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World better than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but I think this book is probably the greater achievement. I’ve read two other books by Haruki Murakami, both of which used the same magical realism devices that this book uses. It’s about all these things, and it is about them in the most interesting way. It’s about depression and the act of story telling. It’s about a normal man and the many weird women that he meets. It’s about the modern battle for Japan’s soul. It’s about the dangerous, violent nature of Japan’s military history. It is also about the properties, magical and otherwise, of water. “I’m going to take you out of here … I’m going to take you home, to the world where you belong, where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning.”
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