Toru Okada's cat has disappeared.
His wife is growing more distant every day.
Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been 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.
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[WHEN THE PHONE rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta]***
(Vintage Digital, 10 October 2011, first published 12 April 1994, ebook, 626 pages, Around the Year in 52 Books 2019, a book written by a far east Asian author or set in a far east Asian country, bought from @AmazonKindle)
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I'm a huge fan of Murakami. I've read quite a lot of his books and they have blown me away every time. He's one of my favourite writers. It's hard to describe his work if you haven't read it before. Bizarre. Surreal. Dark blended perfectly with light. Downright strange at times. A dream you're sort of afraid of but never want to end. This was no exception and worked on every level. You need to surgically remove the logical part of your brain when you read this book otherwise you will be very lost and confused. I just let myself be carted off reading this one. This book is laced with strange events that seem to have nothing to do with each other and gradually revealed to be connected in ways I never imagined. I really didn't want this book to end because I loved it so much.
