A fifteen-year-old runs away from home; an old man who can talk to cats searches for a stone. The two narratives converge in ways that resist explanation, as Murakami's novels always do. Published in 2002, this is one of his most ambitious works, drawing on Greek tragedy, Japanese folklore, and the Beatles. The prose in English translation is simple and hypnotic. The novel offers no final meaning, only the experience of reading it, of submitting to its dream logic, of arriving somewhere strange.