The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami

I was very exited to find this book, a fat novel by the author of The Elephant Vanishes. The inside flap did a good job of hyping me up even more "..with this hugely ambitious new book... he will take his place in the international pantheon of contemporary literature." Oh lordy, have I got to see that - clearly a must-read by all accounts.

Magnum Opus is good descripton of this story. Murakami manages to write with a grand scope and wonderfully small at the same time. It's about a marriage crisis, foremost; it's about the recent history of a nation; it's about a lost cat and its about a battle between super-forces in a ghostly other-world. The author has a delicate touch with profound ideas and moments that are homey and mundane. His hero is extremely likeable.

"I rarely suffer lengthy emotional distress from contact with other people. A person may anger or annoy me, but not for long. I can distinguish between myself and another as beings of two different realms. It's a kind of talent (by which I do not mean to boast: it's not an easy thing to do, so if you can do it, it is a kind of a talent - a special power). When someone gets on my nerves, the first thing I do is transfer the object of my unpleasant feelings to another domain, one having no connection with me. Then I tell myself, Fine, I'm feeling bad, but I've put the source of these fellings into another zone, away from here, where I can examine it and deal with it later in my own good time. In other words, I put a freeze on my emotions. Later, when I thaw them out to perform the examination, I do occasionally find my emotions in a distressed state, but that is rare. The passage of time will usuallly extract the venom from most things and render them harmless. Then sooner or later, I forget about them.

In the course of my life so far, I've been able to keep my world in a relatively stable state by avoiding most useless troubles through activation of this emotional management system. That I have succeeded in maintaining such an efective system all this time is a matter of some pride to me.

When it came to Noboru Wataya, though, my system refused to function. I was unable simply to shove Noboru Wataya into a domain having no connection to me. And that fact itself annoyed the hell out of me... "

All the characters, both the central ones and the walk-ons, are finely drawn and tell amazing stories that feed and inform Toru Okada's quest to bring his wife back home. Like "The Elephant Vanishes", wit and a dream-like mysticism drive Haruki Murakami's odd and excellent vision of things.

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