Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami

Narrated By: Rupert Degas

Duration: 1 day, 2 hours and 7 minutes

What to expect

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

Genre

Modern & contemporary fiction, Fiction in translation, Magical realism

Listen to a sample

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

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

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

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

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