4.5 stars

Now that I have had time to breathe and sleep after finsihing this book, I feel that I have recovered enough from the mindfck (not meant negatively) it gave me. Still I wonder whether my review will read like anything more than weird blathering. I'm not making any promises.

The wonderful thing is that, on the surface, Murakami started this novel like a family drama where one person realises too late that they have taken their partner for granted and thus have lost them. But that wouldn't really be Murakami, would it?
Of course, there is a cat - or the disappearance of one which sets off the whole spiral of events which make Toru Okada, the main character, drift further and further away from what most people would call the real world. There, furthermore, are a bunch of psychically gifted persons of various shapes, a psychic prostitute, a teenager working for a wig company, a cursed soldier, a young man who can't speak since he saw his father bury a heart in their garden with a stranger, a power-hungry, sinister brother-in-law, a haunted house, and a bird who winds the spring of the world and also functions as an omen of undefined allegience. And they all are part of the same web that somehow has moved into a position to make it a tangent to Toru's reality and existence. This world doesn't necessarily hold itself to common ideas about space-time or the laws of cause and consequence. Its inhabitants are strange and powerful, and mostly not exactly well-meaning.
As any proper knight in shining armour would do, Toru, or Mr Wind-up Bird, sets out to save his wife from this fascinating and horrifying mess.

As I mentioned before, this novel did something to my brain, possibly put a few knots into its wiring which didn't need to be there. I actually felt as exhausted as Toru after clubbing whatever creature it precisely was in the hotel room that maybe never was and then returning to the well which just might have been filled by the tears of a distraught teenager miles and miles away. (Do you see what I mean when I say this novel twisted some wiring in my brain?)
Nonetheless, I highly recommend this book to anyone inclined towards Murakami's special kind of weirdness and surrealism and daring enough for a bit of (possibly reversible) mindfckery.