Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started 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.

In the so-called act of living, there's only an extremely limited, brief period when light can shine through. It might be just a matter of ten or so seconds. After that passes, and if you fail to grasp the revelation contained within it in time, there's no such thing as a second chance...

The novel 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' (1994-1995) by Haruki Murakami, one of the world's most popular writers, is a work truly of Joycean scale. The horror of World War II and the fate of our contemporary in Japan, letters, mystical dreams, memories, journal articles, encoded files - a complete canvas woven from incredible events, subtle irony, and the inimitable intonation of Haruki Murakami, who said about his work: 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an attempt at an absolute novel... it is a book of healing'.