April 13–19, 2026
Between two cultures, two languages, two selves. Five novels about the search for home — and the discovery that home might not be a place at all.
A nameless stray cat settles into a schoolteacher's home and spends six hundred pages savagely anatomizing human pretension — Soseki's feline narrator belongs everywhere and nowhere, the perfect outsider's vantage on a world obsessed with fitting in.
A runaway boy and a man who speaks to cats drift toward each other across impossible distances — Murakami's most expansive novel suggests that home isn't a place you escape, but a person you're meant to find.
by Xinran
Three sisters chase the city's promises and discover that belonging isn't waiting in the factories, restaurants, and salons they imagined — it's something they must build from scratch, together. Xinran maps the invisible geography between the village they've left and the selves they're becoming.
A grief-stricken student caught between two women — one tethered to loss, one insistently alive — learns that belonging means choosing which ghosts to carry and which to release. Murakami's most emotionally direct novel maps the impossible geometry of mourning.
Two cousins—one heading toward Tokyo and adulthood, the other tethered to the seaside by illness—must untangle what binds them and discover who they become apart. Yoshimoto captures the ache of outgrowing the people who shaped us.