The wind-up bird chronicle is a series of stories on a computer which may or may not have anything to do with our protagonist Toru Okada. The wind-up bird itself is an enigmatic bird which appears to make a sound like the winding of a spring without itself being visible and may or may not be audible to all. Toru Okada is given the nickname "Mr Wind-up Bird" by sixteen year old truant, May Kasahara. Toru is a thirty year old man between jobs when he is drawn into a complex web of events which challenge him to confront the boundaries between the present and the past and the real and the supposedly unreal. What begins as the search for a lost cat becomes a desperate journey to find his wife who mysteriously disappears without any trace. As Toru becomes increasingly involved with, among others, a pair of psychic sisters called Malta and Creta Kano, he is forced to question ever harder his own notion of self and the reality that up until these events he has taken largely for granted. His wife's brother Noboru Wataya is a key figure in all the events that have led up to this moment and it seems that there will eventually be some kind of confrontation between them. Through the acquaintance of a fortune teller who had once been a Corporal in the Japanese imperial army and served in Manchuria, we meet Tokutaro Mamiya who himself had been a first Lieutenant. It is through the voice of Mamiya that we hear of some of the events that occurred during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Mamiya survives being thrown in a well in Outer Mongolia and this inspires Toru to climb down into a well he himself has found in the neighborhood while looking for his cat. As Honda advises him at one stage:

"The point is not to resist the flow. You go up when you're supposed to go up and down when you're supposed to go down. When you're supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you're supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom."

The dried up well is at the back of a house which seems to be cursed because of the misfortune that came upon former residents including the suicide of three. Toru evolves a ritual of going into the well and needs to have access to it and therefore wants to bye the land. To earn the money necessary he becomes a kind of healer to an exclusive set of clients organized by two more mysterious figures we come to know as Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka. It is Cinnamon that has "The Wind Up Bird Chronicles" on his computer. Toru struggles throughout to come face to face with his wife but must be satisfied with a conversation via computer. His purchase and development of the "hanging house" could create problems for Noboru Wataya who has risen to become a member of the diet and a leading political figure. The stage is set for a confrontation between the two but where exactly does it take place? What is the secret between his wife Kumiko and her brother Noboru? Will he ever come face to face with his wife again? The relationship between memory and history, prophecy and the apparent fulfillment of those prophecies and the physical and the metaphysical are all explored in a narrative that is both a satisfying journey and an unknown destination. This book is destined to become a classic.