The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

-Ten minutes, please.

-Excuse me? To whom did you wish to speak?

-To you, of course. Ten minutes, please. That's all we need to understand each other's feelings.

Toru Okada is 32 and unemployed. He spends his days looking for his missing cat, swimming laps at the ward pool, boiling spaghetti for breakfast, and sucking on lemon drops. He lives in a quiet house on a quiet street that dead-ends in both directions, and is watched over by an unseen bird that seems to wind its spring to start each morning.

And then Mr. Okada's wife disappears, and our Japanese Everyman sets out on a journey to find her, from Manchuria to Kyoto to the world of dreams. The strange telephone calls persist. Many, many sexually alluring women of all ages enter his life. I would say that Toru Okada has no less than three wet dreams over the course of the first 200 pages. Our narrator is wrapped up in political conspiracy, war stories about men getting skinned alive, undercover bald profiling for a wig company, mystical healing powers and mysterious blue scars. He beats the shit out of a man with a baseball bat. He finds himself at the bottom of a well. And there's someone waiting for him in a hotel room in a reality just beyond the present one, if only Toru Okada can figure out how to pass through the door.

All in all, a very interesting read. It's chock-full of images and stories and dark Japanese history. It's consistently engaging. It's also really sad, when consumed on the human level of a lonely man who's so broken by the loss of his wife that all he can do is spin a massive all-encompassing fairy tale to trick himself that the pain isn't real.

However, it's also an unnecessary 600 pages long, which is not a terrible length if justified. But after finishing, I didn't think it was justified. A little too swollen, perhaps. It seemed like Murakami just couldn't bring himself to whittle it down.

I don't know. I'm still looking for that one Murakami book that just knocks my socks off. I know it's out there. It has to be. But so far, every Haruki tome that I've read has me wanting just a little bit more. And I want to be satiated. Give me what I need.