The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami writes novels the way certain composers write music—there is a surface logic and a deeper dream logic operating simultaneously, and the magic is in how seamlessly they coexist. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle begins with a man looking for his missing cat and ends somewhere so far from where it started that you cannot quite retrace the steps. Along the way there are mysterious women, a dried-up well, visions of wartime atrocities, and a politician who may or may not be genuinely evil. None of this should cohere, and yet it does. This was the book that made me understand what magical realism could do at its absolute best: use the fantastical to illuminate truths the real cannot reach alone.

Readers who find themselves lost in Toru's well should explore Kafka on the Shore, where Murakami pursues similar themes of identity and the unconscious through the parallel stories of a runaway teenager and an old man who talks to cats.