The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. By Haruki Murakami.
This is not a casual read. Set a couple of weeks aside if you're going to start, be prepared to lose your way more than once. With a book like this, you must trust the author and hope he knows what he is doing, and that he will resolve everything in the end.
The twists and turns of the plot are impossible to record here and I am not sure they are all relevent. Toro Okada, the main protagonist, leads an ordinary and blameless life. Then his wife disappears. His efforts to find her are unfocused and surreal, involving sitting at the bottem of a dry well for days, researching the war in Manchuria and meeting people with psycic abilities. Most of the book is spent relating these character's seemingly unconnected stories, but he needs to hear them in order to have the strengh and knowledge to find the place where his wife is and bring her back to the normal world.
As you read you really have to keep faith that this is going somewhere, fortunately the writing is of a high quality, and all the characters are interesting and have interesting stories to tell, so you have enough to keep you going to the end.
I will give it a 7 out of ten, a difficult read but worth it, - just.