This is a kind of Alice in Wonderland premise: A man is looking for a cat. Murakami describes these banal domestic experiences, but, cumulatively, he spins an outrageous, trippy story. That's a kind of magic—to make the magical seem ordinary and vice versa. It's such a tender story, his search for the cat and, by extension, a life. That one task leads him on a labyrinthine journey.

The book you like to give as a gift: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Murakami - it's like an invitation into another dimension. Aside from that, I was given Paul Coelho's The Alchemist in the early 2000s when I was going through a particularly rough patch, shortly after I stopped drinking. The book helped me a lot at the time and I gift it myself quite regularly these days.

In addition to “Notes on Camp” and these copies of Didion and Kondo, he was previously spotted carrying “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” by Haruki Murakami in London earlier this year.