Trust Us: You'll Love These Books With Unreliable Narrators

Not Haruki Murakami's first venture into unreliable narration, but maybe his finest, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" ($19) follows a young man searching first for his wife's missing cat, and then for his wife, in a Tokyo suburb. Throughout his search, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists in what becomes not only an imaginative detective story, but an account of a disintegrating marriage. Murakami weaves in buried secrets from Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II as well.