The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)
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  • Published: 29 October 2020
  • ISBN: 9781473582576
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)

Formats & editions
Paperback
3 Dec 2019
Paperback
1 Dec 2010
Paperback
1 Apr 2003
Hardback
15 Nov 2022
EBook
10 Oct 2011
Audiobook
29 Oct 2020
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Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original - The Times

Brought to you by Penguin.

Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.

© Haruki Murakami 1994 (P) Penguin Audio 2020
  • Published: 29 October 2020
  • ISBN: 9781473582576
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
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About the author

Haruki Murakami

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

portrait photo of Haruki Murakami

Also by Haruki Murakami

A Wild Sheep Chase
Dance Dance Dance
Desire
Birthday Girl
South of the Border, West of the Sun
Novelist as a Vocation
The Elephant Vanishes
See all

Praise for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)

Murakami writes of contemporary Japan, urban alienation and journeys of self-discovery, and in this book he combines recollections of the war with metaphysics, dreams and hallucinations into a powerful and impressionistic work

Independent

Deeply philosophical and teasingly perplexing, it is impossible to put down

Daily Telegraph

Murakami weaves these textured layers of reality into a shot-silk garment of deceptive beauty

Independent on Sunday

Critics have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon - a roster so ill assorted as to suggest Murakami is in fact an original

New York Times

How does Murakami manage to make poetry while writing of contemporary life and emotions? I am weak-kneed with admiration

Independent on Sunday

[A] mesmeric story

Shortlist

Visionary...a bold and generous book

New York Times

Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original

The Times

Murakami writes of contemporary Japan, urban alienation and journeys of self-discovery, and in this book he combines recollections of the war with metaphysics, dreams and hallucinations into a powerful and impressionistic work

Independent

Murakami weaves these textured layers of reality into a shot-silk garment of deceptive beauty

Independent on Sunday

Critics have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon - a roster so ill assorted as to suggest Murakami is in fact an original

New York Times

Deeply philosophical and teasingly perplexing, it is impossible to put down

Daily Telegraph

How does Murakami manage to make poetry while writing of contemporary life and emotions? I am weak-kneed with admiration

Independent on Sunday