Stylistically, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force. Murakami excels, as always, in imbuing meaning into every little moment - the conversations between Toru and May seem to be bursting with a subtext of romantic and/or sexual interest, for instance. Throughout the novel, Murakami's beautiful descriptions seem to capture pure undistilled emotions - pain, suffering, longing; the sense of disquiet of that pervades his work is especially notable here. Yet the feeling of unease does not mean The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is above humour. One of the central premises of Del Close's Harold method of improv comedy is that you accept every proposition in the world, and this same bemused acceptance of the absurd is present here in Okada's wry responses and the general flat tone in which surreal events are described. So Okada's decision to rest at the bottom of a dry well and his subsequent passing through the wall of the well to an alternate world are no more and no less implausible in the novel than picking up dry-cleaning from the cleaners.

It's true that the plot of the novel doesn't quite cohere even at the end. Perhaps the various strands once unleashed were too numerous to pull together. But perhaps, too, feeling is first, and the inescapable aesthetic and philosophical responses to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle means the novel is one that sears itself into your consciousness.