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Book Cover for: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami

Reader Score

95%

95% of readers

recommend this book

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"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is many things: the story of a marriage that mysteriously collapses; a jeremiad against the superficiality of contemporary politics; an investigation of painfully suppressed memories of war; a bildungsroman about a compassionate young man's search for his own identity as well as that of his nation. All of Murakami's storytelling genius -- combining elements of detective fiction, deadpan humor, and metaphysical truth, and swiftly transforming commonplace realism into surreal revelation -- is on full, seamless display. And in turning his literary imagination loose on a broad social and political canvas, he bares nothing less than the soul of a country steeped in the violence of the 20th century.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Vintage
  • Publish Date: Sep 1st, 1998
  • Pages: 624
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.01in - 5.25in - 1.30in - 0.96lb
  • EAN: 9780679775430
  • Categories: • Literary• Magical Realism• Fantasy - Contemporary

About the Author

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. The most recent of his many honors is the Yomiuri Literary Prize, whose previous recipients include Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe. He is the author of the novels Dance, Dance, Dance, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and A Wild Sheep Chase, and of The Elephant Vanishes, a collection of stories. His latest novel, South of the Border, West of the Sun, will be published by Knopf in 1999. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages.

Praise for this book

"Dreamlike and compelling.... Murakami is a genius." --Chicago Tribune

"Mesmerizing.... Murakami's most ambitious attempt yet to stuff all of modern Japan into a single fictional edifice." --The Washington Post Book World

"A significant advance in Murakami's art ... a bold and generous book." --The New York Times Book Review

"A stunning work of art ... that bears no comparisons." --New York Observer

"With The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami spreads his brilliant, fantastical wings and soars." --Philadelphia Inquirer

"Seductive.... A labyrinth designed by a master, at once familiar and irresistibly strange." --San Francisco Chronicle

"An epic ... as sculpted and implacable as a bird by Brancusi." --New York Magazine

"Mesmerizing, original ... fascinating, daring, mysterious and profoundly rewarding." --Baltimore Sun

"A beguiling sense of mystery suffuses The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and draws us irresistibly and ever deeper into the phantasmagoria of pain and memory.... Compelling [and] convincing." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Digs relentlessly into the buried secrets of Japan's past ... brilliantly translated into the latest vernacular." --Pico Iyer, Time