The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1994)

The phone rings while Toru Okada is boiling spaghetti, and a stranger on the line wants ten minutes of his time, and from that small interruption the floor of an ordinary life quietly gives way. First the cat goes missing, then his wife, and the search for them leads not out into Tokyo but down, into a dry well in an abandoned garden where he sits in the dark to think and the walls begin to dissolve. _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_ keeps folding the domestic against the unspeakable: a marriage gone silent at the kitchen table, and a man flayed alive in the borderlands of the Manchurian war, recounted so calmly you forget to flinch until it is too late. Murakami's prose stays level, almost gentle, even as the strangeness thickens, and that evenness is the horror. The violence was never coming for Toru. It was already here, wound into the world each morning by a bird he will never see.