Best Ever
Fiction?

Toru Okada’s cat disappears. This is the first thing that happens in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and in a sense it’s the only thing that happens—a man looking for something lost, following threads that lead deeper into a labyrinth he didn’t know existed. The cat is named Noboru Wataya, after Toru’s brother-in-law, whom he despises. This detail seems like a joke at first. By the novel’s end, it feels like prophecy.

But here’s the thing: the prophecy never explains itself.

Murakami’s method is accumulation without resolution. Strange events pile up: a psychic sister duo, a woman who calls Toru to describe sexual fantasies, a vacant lot with a mysterious well, a soldier’s memories of atrocities in Manchuria, a boy who beats people with a baseball bat. The reader waits for the structure to reveal itself, for the pieces to click into place. They don’t—not in the way conventional novels promise. The connections are felt rather than understood, rhymes rather than arguments. You know they belong together. You can’t prove why.

The well is the novel’s central image. Toru descends into it, sits in absolute darkness, and waits. What he’s waiting for isn’t clear, even to him. The well becomes a space outside time, a passage between realities, a metaphor for meditation or depression or both. Murakami never explains it. The power lies precisely in the refusal. The well is what you bring to it.

The war chapters disturb the novel’s dreamlike surface with sudden violence. Lieutenant Mamiya’s account of witnessing a prisoner skinned alive in Mongolia is narrated with a flatness that makes it more horrifying, not less. These aren’t surreal interludes—they’re history, specifically the history Japan has tried to forget. Murakami places these atrocities alongside Toru’s domestic mysteries not to explain one with the other but to suggest that violence sinks into the ground, contaminates the water table, surfaces in unexpected places generations later.

The contamination never gets cleaned up. That’s the point.

Kumiko, Toru’s wife, vanishes partway through the novel, and her absence becomes a gravity well bending everything around it. Why did she leave? Where did she go? The answers, when they come, involve her brother—the politician Noboru Wataya, the novel’s villain, a man whose evil manifests not through action but through spiritual contamination. He’s Murakami’s portrait of a certain pathology: the polished surface concealing rot, public propriety masking private cruelty.

Toru himself is a Murakami archetype: passive, unemployed, content to cook spaghetti and listen to classical music. Critics sometimes find these protagonists frustrating—why won’t they do anything?—but the passivity is the point. Toru is a vessel. He attracts strangeness because he’s empty enough to receive it. His journey isn’t about agency. It’s about attention—sitting still long enough to perceive what’s been there all along.

By the end, Toru has changed, though describing how proves difficult. He’s descended into darkness and returned. He’s confronted evil and survived. The cat has come back—or a cat has; Murakami leaves the identification uncertain. The wind-up bird still calls from its unseen perch, making the sound of a world being wound tight, storing energy for some future release.

What that release will look like, the novel doesn’t say. It can’t. Some darkness can only be witnessed. Resolution would be a lie, and Murakami refuses to tell it.

Six hundred pages of questions. No answers. And somehow, that’s all the truth you need.

Haruki Murakami: The Best Ever is the uncanny rendered in plain language. Is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle the Best Ever Surrealist Novel? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• Jay Rubin’s definitive English translation appears in the Vintage International paperback.
• The audiobook handles the tonal shifts beautifully across 26 hours, narrated by Rupert Degas.