“With The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , Murakami spreads his brilliant, fantastical wings and soars.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Seductive.… A labyrinth designed by a master, at once familiar and irresistibly strange.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“An epic … as sculpted and implacable as a bird by Brancusi.”
— New York Magazine
“Mesmerizing, original … fascinating, daring, mysterious and profoundly rewarding.”
— Baltimore Sun
“A beguiling sense of mystery suffuses The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and draws us irresistibly and ever deeper into the phantasmagoria of pain and memory.… Compelling [and] convincing.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Digs relentlessly into the buried secrets of Japan’s past … brilliantly translated into the latest vernacular.”
—Pico Iyer, Time
“A bold and generous book.… No matter how fantastical the events it describes may be, the straight-ahead storytelling never loses its propulsive force.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Compelling.”
—Los Angeles Times
“A vision no American novelist could have invented.… [Murakami] aims to provoke not just a frisson of unsettlement, but a deeper, more consequential unease.”
— Newsday
“A major work.… On a canvas stretched from Manchuria to Malta, and with sound effects from strange birdcalls to sleigh bells in cyberspace, this is a fully mature, engrossing tale of individual and national destinies entwined. It will be hard to surpass.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A surreal, sprawling drama … that marks Murakami’s most ambitious work to date.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Ambitious.… The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle soars, thanks to Murakami’s virtuosic control … and his complex, disturbing view of human nature.”
— Time Out
“Everything in [ The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle ] is intricately connected to everything else.… [It] resonates in our time, across history, within individuals.”
—Boston Globe