The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Huraki Murakami Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: New York, 1997 The author was born in Kyoto in 1947 and now lives in Tokyo. He is the author of novels translated into fourteen languages and a recipient of the Yomiuri Literary Prize. Toru Okada has been married for 6 years when his wife Yokimura asks him to find her lost cat. Soon after he begins to look for the cat, his wife also mysteriously disappears. In looking for both, he encounters such strange characters as Malta Kano, a lady in a red vinyl hat, Creta Kano, her prostitute daughter, May Kasahara, the girl in the alley, and Lietuenant Mamiya, the former Japanese soldier who delivers a box and remains to tell a gruesome war story. Mr. Okada decides to ponder his state of affairs deep within a well on the abandoned property near his house and the story proceeds from there. As in other Japanese fiction, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a novel of complex ideas told in simple sentences. This story of epic proportion has multiple elements that make reading a pleasure...including mystery, puzzling characters, friendship, history, symbolism, brutality, revenge, spirituality, and a sense of justice. It can be read at many levels, interpreted many ways, or enjoyed for being simply a story of two different world which intersect at different points in time. The driving force behind the novel is the search for how seemingly unrelated occurences will later converge. Compelling the reader to move forward at an ever increasing rate of speed, the plot will not release its grip until the very last sentence. Then it only does so with a warm feeling of friendship and a hope that good will always prevail over evil. [Fiction] Updated 10-03-00