The narrative path through this distinctive world will look familiar to readers of both the hardboiled detective stories of Mickey Spillane and the metaphysically edged science fiction of Philip K. Dick, and there’s more than a little Kafka in the air. Yet none of these analogs suggests the seamless weirdness that is Murakami’s alone; he creates a field of fantasy that is simultaneously familiar and eerily otherworldly, quick with humor and eroticism, alive with a literary static electricity whose shocks are peculiarly addictive. This energy pulses through Toru Okada’s bewildering odyssey in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a quest that brings him into unexpected proximity to historical horrors (specifically those surrounding Japan’s brutal campaigns in Manchuria in the 1930s) and finds him spending a remarkable amount of rewarding time in the bottom of an empty well (you’ll be surprised at how intriguing you may find it, too).
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