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Many of the previous reviews do a great job of discussing this novel, and I will not repeat that discussion here. But what the previous reviews do not mention is that the American publishers, Knopf, forced Murakami and his translator, Jay Rubin, to significantly abridge the original Japanese text. The casual reader would have no way of knowing this, and, indeed, I only noticed because I was reading alternating chapters of the book in English and Russian translations. Half-way through the novel, entire chapters suddenly started disappearing from the English-language text. Puzzled, I went back to the copyright page of the English-language edition, where, for the first time, I noticed the cryptic notation that the book was not only translated but also "adapted from the Japanese." How much of the original text was "adapted" away? I don't read Japanese, but, based on a comparison with my Russian-language translation, which appears to be complete (no Russian publisher would commit such a travesty on an award-winning novel), it seems that something like 15-20% of the text has been cut. For those of you who find the English-language text of the "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" choppy, or puzzling, or seemingly incomplete, at least some of the blame lies at the feet of the American publishers who decided, unilaterally, that American readers cannot handle a long book. Anyway, the upshot is that if you can comfortably do so, try to read the "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" in a non-English translation. Or, if you can't, demand that Jay Rubin's original and complete English-language translation be published.