The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

VERY GOOD condition — DUST JACKET: Minor wear to top and bottom edges of spine, panels, folds and flaps. A couple of very small chips to laminate face, bottom
outside edge, back panel. BOARDS: Minor shelf rubbing/scuffing to bottom edges. Very small bump to top outside edge, front. BOOK: Very minor soiling to textblock head. Please inspect photos closely for condition details.

Here on offer is an exceptionally nice copy of Huraki Murakami's award-winning novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which many regard as his masterpiece, appearing in The Telegraph's 2014 list of the 10 all-time greatest Asian novels. This copy is a 1st American edition, 1st printing of the work published by Alfred Knopf in 1997. The dust jacket is protected from further wear by a Mylar sleeve.

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"Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.

In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon."

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Haruki Murakami (born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been bestsellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and the Princess of Asturias Awards.

Growing up in Ashiya near Kobe before moving to Tokyo to attend Waseda University, he published his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) after working as the owner of a small jazz bar for seven years. His notable works include the novels Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Kafka on the Shore (2002), and 1Q84 (2009–10), with 1Q84 ranked as the best work of Japan's Heisei era (1989–2019) by the national newspaper Asahi Shimbun's survey of literary experts. His work spans genres including science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction, and has become known for its use of magical realist elements. His official website lists Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Brautigan as key inspirations to his work, while Murakami himself has cited Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, and Dag Solstad as his favourite currently active writers. Murakami has also published five short story collections, including First Person Singular (2020), and non-fiction works including Underground (1997), inspired by personal interviews Murakami conducted with victims of the Tokyo subway sarin attack, and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007), a series of personal essays about his experience as a marathon runner.

His fiction has polarized literary critics and the reading public. He has sometimes been criticised by Japan's literary establishment as un-Japanese, leading to Murakami's recalling that he was a "black sheep in the Japanese literary world". Meanwhile, Murakami has been described by Gary Fisketjon, the editor of Murakami's collection The Elephant Vanishes (1993), as a "truly extraordinary writer", while Steven Poole of The Guardian praised Murakami as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his oeuvre.

The above text was taken from Alfred Knopf publishers (via Google Books) and Wikipedia.