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Toru Okada recently quit his job at the law office and has been spending his time alone in the house all day while his wife, Kumiko, goes to work. One day while cooking he receives a strange phone call from a women claiming to know him. He can't recognize her voice though and becomes confused by this turn of events. Kumiko is worried because recently their cat disappeared. Usually their cat comes home after a while even though he wanders off and so Toru goes off in search of the cat. On his search he meets and befriend the neighbor girl May Kasahara, who is staying home from school after getting into an accident. May and Toru spend time together, watching and waiting to see if the cat will come home. Things take an even weirder turn when Kumiko tells her husband to consult with Malta Kano, who helps people and Kumiko knows through her brother Noboru Wataya. Toru hates Noboru Wataya and is confused by this turn in events, even more so when Kumiko doesn't seem to come home one night, leading him to set out to search for her and get caught in a complex web all pertaining to Noboru Wataya.

This was my first Haruki Murakami book and I really enjoyed it, it's definitely a new favorite. I tend to enjoy magical realism a lot and I loved the writing and the characters and the themes that were explored in the book. I really enjoyed May and her obsession with death and her struggling to understand it and I enjoyed so much of the ideas that came up about relationships. I also just love mysticism and books that are more on the ideological side. I think it was incorporated really well with the plot, and the way things came up through out the book felt so natural which is hard to do in my opinion. The writing was also really great, and I loved the repetition and the way so many things in the book would occur again and again. I can't explain why it appealed to me so much but it just did. I also loved the way things tied up together, I love when story lines work together interlocking webs of events and ideas.

The only thing I may be some what iffy on is the ending, only because it felt abrupt in comparison to the rest of the book. Also things weren't really clear and I don't think we receive a good explanation for what was actually happening. Which may have been the point but I'm not smart enough to figure out why he may have done that if anyone has any ideas?