A man searches for his missing cat, then his missing wife, and descends into a Tokyo that becomes increasingly surreal: a dry well where he sits in darkness, a sinister politician brother-in-law, memories of wartime atrocities in Manchuria. Murakami's longest and most ambitious novel blends the domestic and the metaphysical with dreamlike fluidity. The prose is plain, almost affectless, which makes the strangeness stranger. It is a book about how violence echoes across decades, how the ordinary world hides doorways into the inexplicable.