Claire Danes's Bookshelf

'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' By Haruki Murakami
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
By Haruki Murakami

This is a kind of Alice in Wonderland premise: A man is looking for a cat. Murakami describes these banal domestic experiences, but, cumulatively, he spins an outrageous, trippy story. That's a kind of magic—to make the magical seem ordinary and vice versa. It's such a tender story, his search for the cat and, by extension, a life. That one task leads him on a labyrinthine journey.