The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The cat disappeared first. Everything important in this book starts with something small leaving.

Sitting at the bottom of the dry well, thinking. Cheapest retreat center in fiction.

Lieutenant Mamiya's Mongolia chapter, a war story that walks out of the closet and stays.

Malta and Creta Kano, sisters named after islands who run a consultancy on intuition.

Toru's blue-black mark under the skin. The book brands its readers too.

May Kasahara's wig factory letters, the funniest narrator of decay I've met.

Noboru Wataya wins the election. The villain's surname is the reader's own century.

The baseball bat in the hotel room. Violence as punctuation nobody asked for.

Kumiko's letter at the end, the book's one honest confession, mailed late.

Carried out of it: go sit in the well. The answer needs quiet, not light.