Jay Rubin

Haruki Murakami

Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.

In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

ねじまき鳥クロニクル

Alec Karlen

"Take all the time you need," I said. "Until you're ready. Time is the one thing we've got plenty of. I'll be right here with you. There's no rush. I just want you to keep one thing in mind: Anything of yours-anything at all, as long as it belongs to you-I will accept as my own. That is one thing you will never have to worry about."

I think we all have thought about this idea more than one time, no one needs us or we can die alone and no one will notice that. I can't precisely put that into words but is so sad and now i can't stop thinking about it. And i hope we all are surrounded by the people who love and need us all the time.

Miyamoto Musashi

No doubt about it: a whole day had gone by. But my one-day absence was probably not having an effect on anybody. Not one human being had noticed that I was gone, likely. I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.

tessa heron

‘Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that persons essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?’

taylor miles hopkins

But this was the home I had chosen. I had had a home, of course, when I was a child. But it was not one I had chosen for myself. I had been born into it, presented with it as an established fact. Now, however, I lived in a world that I had chosen through an act of will. It was my home. It might not be perfect, but the fundamental stance I adopted with regard to my home was to accept it, problems and all, because it was something I myself had chosen.

 Maybe when people people ake their eyes off them, inanimate objects become even more inanimate.

Srijita Sarkar 

I saw it as a big, dark room. I was standing there holding a cigarette lighter, its tiny flame showing me only the smallest part of the room.

Would I ever see the rest? Or would I grow old and die without ever really knowing her?

What was the point of my life at all if I was spending it in bed with an unknown companion?

In a place like this, in the middle of the day like this, there existed a darkness as deep as this.

I had no more plans for the afternoon than a migrating bird has collateral assets.

But now I could not even die. In my numbness, I lacked the strength to kill myself. I felt nothing: no pain, no joy. All feeling was gone. And I was not even me.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle quotes

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