From the bestselling author ofNorwegian WoodandHard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the Worldcomes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times."Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction." —The New York Times • "More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world."—San Francisco Chronicle • "Murakami is masterful." —Los Angeles TimesWe begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world – a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper...