The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Toru Okada's cat goes missing. Then his wife disappears. Then he finds himself at the bottom of a dry well, and the novel opens into Japan's forgotten history — the violence of the Manchurian occupation, the atrocities committed by the Imperial Army, the way a nation buries its worst acts under layers of normalcy and forgetfulness. Murakami uses surrealism to dispatch from inside Japan's unresolved relationship with its own 20th century — the things that happened that the postwar economic miracle was designed to cover over. His most politically serious novel and his best.