The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami (trans. Jay Rubin)

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.

Some time ago (something like 10 years ago now, actually. Crazy.), I read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. To this day I cannot tell you just what the hell that book was about, and I don't recall any book ever taking me as long as that one did to slog through. When I told Don about that book, he told me about this one, that his former partner had read and encouraged others to read, despite being the only one who really got it. So I decided to take it upon myself to attempt it as well.

I don't think I really got it. It was not nearly as batshit whacked out as GR was — there is identifiable plot, for one thing, but it was very weird. And I guess one of the big problems I had with it is that not only did I not really understand exactly what was happening or where things were going, but I didn't really get the sense that Murakami did either. For example, there were various disjointed parts of various unrelated stories that intersected with each other in various ways. OK, fine, I can accept the connections between these seemingly unconnected things, but where's the relevance of these connections? Yes, they're connected, but so what? Why are you telling me this? Aside from the main character trying to find his wife, no one else had any identifiable motives for anything they did, so it just felt like a bunch of people trying to be weird for the sake of being weird. Which, by the way, is something that annoys me to no end in real people, and it's no less annoying in fictional characters.

Ultimately, I guess the upshot is that while I wasn't confused as such by this book, I certainly didn't get it. I don't know what he was trying to say or why he was trying to say it, and as such, unfortunately, the book's alleged brilliance somewhat escapes me. But maybe you'll get something out of it.