The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami's novel begins in a Tokyo suburb, where Toru Okada, an unemployed lawyer's assistant, sets out at his wife Kumiko's request to look for their lost cat. Soon she grows distant and he finds himself searching for her too, in a hidden world beneath the calm surface of the city. Along the way he meets a psychic prostitute, a sinister politician with a gift for the media, a darkly cheerful sixteen-year-old girl and an aging veteran marked by Japan's campaign in Manchuria. It works at once as a detective story, an account of a failing marriage and a dig into buried secrets of the Second World War. Murakami won the Yomiuri Literary Award for it.

ReCactus founder Bernard Tan named it among the novels he counts himself a fan of, in an interview about how reading connects him with people.