Murakami’s sprawling breakout novel begins with a missing cat and a drifting marriage, then opens into something much larger and stranger: war memory, psychic descent, sexual obsession, bureaucratic emptiness, violence, dream logic, everything.

Toru Okada, a man almost comically passive, is pulled into a widening system of disappearances, testimonies, wells, and parallel realities. It’s one of Murakami’s best examples of making the mundane feel cosmically unstable. It's before he got commercialised, there's a lot more grit in here.

Originally published in Japanese in the mid-1990s and translated into English by Jay Rubin, this is one of Murakami’s major works: sprawling, hypnotic, disturbing, and much darker than the soft-focus “lonely man makes pasta” version of his reputation sometimes suggests. It is part detective story, part war novel, part metaphysical excavation, interested in what violence does when it is buried inside ordinary life and left to hum.