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Intro
Toru Okada, an average man living in Tokyo, quits his job and becomes a househusband while his wife, Kumiko, works to support them both. At first, Toru enjoys his newfound freedom and is not in any hurry to return to work. One day, Toru’s cat goes missing and he goes out looking for it while Kumiko is at work. While strolling through his neighborhood, he comes across the Miyawaki residence, an abandoned home with a dry well on the property. Across the road from the Miyawaki residence lives a teenager named May Kasahara, who is taking a break from school while she recovers from a motorcycle accident. Toru befriends May, who offers to help him find his missing cat. May is a rebellious and plain-spoken girl who is obsessed with death. Toru enjoys her company, though he does not know what to make of her. Ultimately, he and May fail to find the missing cat.
Around the same time, Toru begins receiving a number of strange phone calls. One is from a mysterious woman who claims to know Toru. Toru tries to determine the mysterious women’s identity, but she will not answer any of his questions and instead tries to engage him in phone sex. A few days later, Toru receives another call from a woman named Malta Kano, whom Kumiko hired to help locate the missing cat. Malta sets up a meeting with Toru, which Toru attends. At the meeting, Toru learns that Malta has psychic powers, which she plans to use to help find the cat. Additionally, Malta tells Toru that Toru’s brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya, raped Malta’s sister, Creta. This information disturbs Toru, though it does not surprise him. Toru despises Noboru and believes he is a mentally disturbed man, though Noboru is a popular public intellectual who is poised to become a major political player in Japan.
Malta employs Creta to help Toru find the missing cat. Creta comes to Toru’s house and collects water samples, which she claims will help. She then tells Toru part of her life story, describing her troubled childhood and attempt to die by suicide as a young adult. After the failed suicide attempt, she became a sex worker. During this period of her life, she met Noboru, though she does not elaborate on the specifics of their interaction. Following his interaction with Creta, Toru starts having sex dreams about her.
After his meeting with Creta, Toru receives a letter from a man named Mamiya, who served in the Japanese Army with Mr. Honda, Toru’s former spiritual advisor. Mamiya informs Toru that Mr. Honda passed away, and so Mamiya is delivering his keepsakes. Apparently, he left a keepsake for Toru, and Mamiya wants to know if he can bring it to him.
Toru invites Mamiya to his house and asks him about his time in the war with Mr. Honda. Mamiya tells Toru about his experience in the Nomonhan Incident, which took place during the Battles of Khalkhin Gol. Mamiya and Honda were part of a secret mission that required them to cross into Soviet and Mongolian territory. However, their mission failed when the enemy (the Mongolians) caught them. Honda and Mamiya watched a Mongolian soldier skin their leader alive. Afterward, the Mongolians threw Mamiya down a dry well and remained there for three days before Honda rescued him. Mamiya tells Toru that the well was pure torture, though the experience did result in a brief sensation of enlightenment about his place in the world. Afterward telling Toru his story, Mamiya gives Toru his gift from Honda, which turns out to be an empty box.
While Toru continues dealing with the issue of the missing cat, Kumiko is busy at work. She comes home later and later each day, always exhausted. She rarely makes time for Toru, and they bicker often. One morning, Toru notices that Kumiko is wearing a new perfume. He worries it might be a gift from a man Kumiko is having an affair with. That night, Kumiko does not come home from work. Toru tries to locate her but cannot. After a few days without hearing from Kumiko, Toru decides she must have run off with another man.
Not long after Kumiko disappears, Malta contacts Toru and asks him to meet her at a hotel. Toru goes to the hotel where he finds Malta and Noboru. Noboru insults Toru—calling him a pathetic excuse for a man—and informs him that Kumiko has left him and wants a divorce. Toru is confused. He does not understand why Kumiko would leave him and why she would not talk to him herself.
To find clarity, Toru goes to the Miyawaki residence and climbs down into their well, which is completely dried up. There, he begins meditating on his life, which has become increasingly fragmented and surreal. He thinks about the origins of his relationship with Kumiko and their early years together. He also contemplates the abortion Kumiko had when she became pregnant before they were ready for children. Toru wanted to keep the baby, but ultimately left the decision up to Kumiko. Kumiko aborted the child while Toru was away on a business trip.
While Toru is down in the well, May Kasahara pays him several visits. Although May’s tone is always playful, she takes away Toru’s rope ladder and shuts the well’s lid, leaving him in complete darkness and with no way to climb out. Toru wonders whether May will ever come back for him. After a few days, he begins to understand what Mamiya was talking about when he spoke of finding enlightenment, as he pushes himself to his physical limits.
One day, he finds himself contemplating the wind-up bird, a bird in his neighborhood with a mechanical sounding chirp. The bird interests Toru because he has never actually seen it, and Kumiko says it winds the spring of the world. As Toru contemplates the bird, he finds himself feeling as though he has actually become it, and he flies around his neighborhood. Toru also begins having strange dreams while in the well. In the dreams, he is in a hotel where the new is always discussing Noboru. He makes his way from the hotel lobby to Room 208, where a mysterious woman—the same woman from the phone calls—is waiting for him. However, he never manages to get a look at her face.
After spending three days in the well, Toru wakes up to find Creta looking down at him. She throws the rope ladder down to him. Allowing him to escape. When Toru gets home, he discovers that he developed a strange mark on his face while he in the well. He does not know what it is or how to get it off. That night, Toru wakes up and finds Creta in his bed, though neither of them knows how she got there.
The next day, Creta tells Toru that she has been having the same dreams about him that he has been having about her. She explains that she works for Malta as a sort of mental sex worker and that her job is to search the minds of Malta’s clients. She also promises Toru that she is working for him and not Noboru. Creta also tells Toru about what happened between her and Noboru. Noboru came to her as a client and violated her in a way she cannot explain. While she was not looking, Noboru stuck something inside of her, which caused her intense pleasure and intense pain. After finishing her story, Creta asks Toru if he will have sex with her. She does not want to be a “prostitute of the mind” anymore because it has exhausted her emotionally. Toru agrees to Creta’s request. Creta also asks Toru if he will move away from Japan with her. Toru says he cannot.
After Creta moves away, Toru does not hear from her or Malta. However, he randomly meets a woman named Nutmeg who works as a spiritual healer. Nutmeg recruits Toru to work her. She also buys the Miyawaki residence to use as their headquarters. Nutmeg can tell from the mark on Toru’s face that he possesses spiritual healing powers from the well. She wants the Miyawaki residence so Toru can continue to draw spiritual energy from the well, which he can use to heal her clients.
During this same time frame, Toru has a number of indirect interactions with Kumiko. She sends him a letter explaining that she was cheating on him with a man she works with. She apologizes and asks Toru for a divorce. Toru also interacts with Ushikawa, a shady individual whom Noboru has employed to handle Toru and Kumiko’s divorce. Noboru wants to do everything he can to ensure the divorce does not become a public affair because he has become a prominent politician and does not want a scandal to disrupt his political career. Ushikawa tells Toru that he cannot meet with Kumiko in person. In response, Toru says he will not grant a divorce until he does.
Toru starts spending all of his time down in the well, which functions as a portal to the hotel in his dreams. He decides that the only way to resolve his situation with Kumiko is determine the identity of the mysterious woman from the hotel. Eventually, he decides that the woman must be Kumiko herself. Toru confronts the woman in his dream and tells her his theory. The woman momentarily changes her voice to sound like Kumiko, but then changes it again to sound like someone else, leaving it ambiguous as to whether Toru is correct. Then, a loud banging comes from the door again. The mysterious woman urges Toru to leave, but he refuses. A shadowy male figure enters the room and begins fighting with Toru. Toru kills the man and then escapes the room. When he wakes up, he is in a well full of water, which Nutmeg helps him out of. Nutmeg tells Noboru that is in critical condition after suddenly collapsing in the street. Toru wonders if the actions that took place in his dreams resulted in Noboru’s sudden collapse.
Following Toru’s latest trip down the well, the mark on his face disappears. Because of this, Nutmeg tells Toru that they can no longer work together. The following day, she leaves, and Toru never sees her again. Not long afterward, Toru receives another letter from Kumiko. Kumiko tells Toru that her first letter was a lie. She did not have sex with another man; she had sex with many other men. She does not know why she acted the way she did and is deeply ashamed of herself. She tells Toru that she thinks her problems stem from Noboru. Additionally, she says that she plans to go to Noboru’s hospital room, shut off his life support, and turn herself in to the police.
Sometime later, Toru takes a train to visit May, who is now working in a factory outside the city. He explains to May that he is waiting for Kumiko’s jail sentence to end so the two of them can be together. After his visit with May, he returns to Tokyo on a train. On his way home, he falls asleep.
