Product Description

Kafka on the Shore is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom.

As their paths converge, and the reasons for that convergence become clear, Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder. Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s great storytellers at the peak of his powers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9454 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-03
• Released on: 2006-01-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.com
The opening pages of a Haruki Murakami novel can be like the view out an airplane window onto tarmac. But at some point between page three and fifteen--it's page thirteen in Kafka On The Shore--the deceptively placid narrative lifts off, and you find yourself breaking through clouds at a tilt, no longer certain where the plane is headed or if the laws of flight even apply.

Joining the rich literature of runaways, Kafka On The Shore follows the solitary, self-disciplined schoolboy Kafka Tamura as he hops a bus from Tokyo to the randomly chosen town of Takamatsu, reminding himself at each step that he has to be "the world¹s toughest fifteen-year-old." He finds a secluded private library in which to spend his days--continuing his impressive self-education--and is befriended by a clerk and the mysteriously remote head librarian, Miss Saeki, whom he fantasizes may be his long-lost mother. Meanwhile, in a second, wilder narrative spiral, an elderly Tokyo man named Nakata veers from his calm routine by murdering a stranger. An unforgettable character, beautifully delineated by Murakami, Nakata can speak with cats but cannot read or write, nor explain the forces drawing him toward Takamatsu and the other characters.

To say that the fantastic elements of Kafka On The Shore are complicated and never fully resolved is not to suggest that the novel fails. Although it may not live up to Murakami's masterful The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Nakata and Kafka's fates keep the reader enthralled to the final pages, and few will complain about the loose threads at the end. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Previous books such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood have established Murakami as a true original, a fearless writer possessed of a wildly uninhibited imagination and a legion of fiercely devoted fans. In this latest addition to the author's incomparable oeuvre, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura runs away from home, both to escape his father's oedipal prophecy and to find his long-lost mother and sister. As Kafka flees, so too does Nakata, an elderly simpleton whose quiet life has been upset by a gruesome murder. (A wonderfully endearing character, Nakata has never recovered from the effects of a mysterious World War II incident that left him unable to read or comprehend much, but did give him the power to speak with cats.) What follows is a kind of double odyssey, as Kafka and Nakata are drawn inexorably along their separate but somehow linked paths, groping to understand the roles fate has in store for them. Murakami likes to blur the boundary between the real and the surreal—we are treated to such oddities as fish raining from the sky; a forest-dwelling pair of Imperial Army soldiers who haven't aged since WWII; and a hilarious cameo by fried chicken king Colonel Sanders—but he also writes touchingly about love, loneliness and friendship. Occasionally, the writing drifts too far into metaphysical musings—mind-bending talk of parallel worlds, events occurring outside of time—and things swirl a bit at the end as the author tries, perhaps too hard, to make sense of things. But by this point, his readers, like his characters, will go just about anywhere Murakami wants them to, whether they "get" it or not.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
If bizarre things are happening in Japan, then there must be a new novel by Haruki Murakami. America's favorite Japanese novelist could publish this anonymously, and his fans would instantly recognize it as his. And for first-time readers, Kafka on the Shore is an excellent demonstration of why he's deservedly famous, both here and in his native land. He writes uncanny, philosophical, postmodern fiction that's actually fun to read; he's a more serious Tom Robbins, a less dense Thomas Pynchon. Like those two, he mixes high and low culture, especially ours: Two of his novels are named after Western pop songs ("Dance Dance Dance" and "Norwegian Wood"), and his characters are more likely to see a film by Truffaut than one by Kurosawa. In this new novel, characters may occasionally discuss The Tale of Genji and the novels of Natsume Soseki, but the presiding influences are Plato, Sophocles and, as the title indicates, Franz Kafka.

It would be easy to make this novel sound goofy: There are talking cats, sudden downpours of fish and leeches, a ghost that takes the form of Col. Sanders pimping in a back alley of Takamatsu, another character who dresses up as the Johnnie Walker whiskey icon and collects the souls of cats for a magic flute, a gorgeous prostitute who quotes Henri Bergson and Hegel, and an "entrance stone" to another dimension. It would be just as easy to make the novel sound ponderous: There are many discussions of Greek tragedy, Plato's myth about the origin of the sexes, predestination, various metaphysical systems, musicology, the nature of symbolism and metaphor, the ways of Buddha and the Tao, and grim memories of atrocities committed during World War II. The wonderful thing is the mash-up Murakami creates from this disparate material, resulting in a novel that is intellectually profound but feels "like an Indiana Jones movie or something," as one character aptly notes.

Or something. The novel consists of two parallel narratives told in alternating chapters. One features a bright but unhappy 15-year-old boy named "Kafka" Tamura -- he adopted the name partly because he likes his fiction but also because "Kafka" is Czech for "crow," with whose solitary nature he identifies -- who runs away from home because of an Oedipal foreboding that he will murder his father and sleep with his mother. (His mother abandoned him at age 4, and he hasn't seen her or his older sister since.) He leaves Tokyo for the southern island of Shikoku and spends most of his time at a private library run by a 21-year-old "hemophiliac of undetermined sex" named Oshima and a mysterious, elegant woman named Miss Saeki, old enough to be his mother. Both of them play key roles in helping the runaway find himself and come to terms with his dark destiny.

The other narrative deals with a retarded, illiterate man in his sixties named Satoru Nakata, who as a child underwent an inexplicable experience during World War II that erased his memory and stunted his intellectual growth. In recompense for that loss, however, he has the ability to communicate with cats and control the weather. (He's the one responsible for those downpours.) He gets involved with the cat-soul collector and commits an act that forces him to flee Tokyo. He hooks up with a truck driver named Hoshino -- just a regular guy who favors aloha shirts, Ray-Bans and a Chunichi Dragons baseball cap -- who agrees to help the old guy. They too make their way to Shikoku on a kind of metaphysical quest for an "entrance stone" that Nakata must open and close. As another character says (this is a very self-conscious text, frequently commenting on itself), it's "like some film noir science-fiction flick."

On one level, the novel is about a 15-year-old boy's rite of passage into the adult world, but on a larger level it's a meditation on Plato's notion (voiced in the "Symposium," as Oshima explains to both Kafka and the reader) that each of us is looking for a soul mate to complete us. Hoshino finds one in Nakata, who reminds him of a dim-witted but devoted disciple of the Buddha, but who also fills in for a beloved grandfather. Kafka finds one in Miss Saeki, who appears to him in dreams both as the 15-year-old girl she once was and at her present age. And though Kafka and Nakata never meet, their parallel actions complement each other on a metaphysical plane. Hermaphroditic Oshima -- the most self-possessed and knowledgeable character in the novel -- exemplifies the original state that Plato said the soul enjoyed before it was split into halves.

Murakami's spin on this theme and the Oedipus myth is daringly original and compulsively readable, enabled by Philip Gabriel's wonderfully fluent translation. Kafka on the Shore is warmly recommended; read it to your cat.

Reviewed by Steven Moore
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

My first (and definitely not last) Murakami
I've heard and read of this mythic Haruki Murakami fellow before reading this book. I thought it would be a nice, summer read when I picked it up at a used bookstore in my neighborhood. At the end of the book, I was a little annoyed and regretful of finally discovering Murakami for myself. I was annoyed because the story was so absorbing and bizzare that I couldn't stop reading it. I just read it and read it for two straight days during the weekend, thus distracting me from graduate school-mandated reading that I really should've been doing.

But anyway, the book was fascinating and extremely engaging. The only other Japanese writer I've read previously was Banana Yoshimoto. I found Murakami's and Yoshimoto's styles similar yet distinct. Both have a simple (but not simplistic) narrative style and is enchanting and not excessively difficult to follow. In this book, Murakami's use of imagery and symbolism is complex, but not so complex to the point of being inexplicable. Even though there are two parallel and separate stories/characters that we are following, the book's flow is smooth and not choppy at all. Although it felt like Murakami himself didn't even know where the story was leading us to for most of the book, it was so addicting that I was just strung along willingly through the maze-like journeys of both protagonists.

All the characters in the book are charmingly flawed and human. Despite the extraordinary circumstances, some of which border on being fantastical and science fiction-y, it is very easy to like and empathize with the characters. There are many loose ends at the end of the story, but somehow, I found that it is still satisfying and did not disappoint. Besides being hooked on to Murakami, my only other regret is that I didn't start reading Murakami earlier.

The Ultimate Blend by Layne Bernstein
Upon first delving into "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami, I found myself dreading another coming of age story. However, it proved to be so much more than this in a variety of ways. Of course, there is still the classic runaway story present, but how many coming of age tales feature talking crows and cats, in addition to raining leeches? Despite my preconceived notions, "Kafka on the Shore" opened up an entirely new realm of thinking for me, which is what I appreciate most in a text.

I truly loved the alternating storylines of Kafka and Nakata with each chapter. Not only were the two incredibly interesting on their own, but I also craved to learn how they would intersect and finally converge. I feel that above all else, such suspense truly kept me engaged and connected at all times, even during rants about World War II.

Moreover, it seems that the overall strangeness of the text cannot be ignored when attempting to uncover what draws the reader in to the point of entranced connection. The bizarre Oedipal complex prophecy, the children passing out during a break from school, Johnny Walker, and the sexual dreams transformed the story into something much larger, something much more powerful. These details removed any suspicions that this was another attempt at a Huckleberry Finn, and introduced the text as its own entity. Additionally, I feel that each of these details, in spite of how strange they may or may not be, allowed the story to transcend to an utterly spiritual level in my mind. They blended the line between reality and imagination, so much so that I found myself barely questioning the dialogue of a cat. Also, the ethereal and poetic writing maintained this blend and instilled a dream-like quality to the text. I believe that this really transformed the story, for with each line, the fantasy becomes a bit more real and the reader is no longer distracted by an over analysis of nightly visits from Miss Saeki's fifteen-year-old spirit with some sort of physics talk.

I find it incredibly fascinating that time has such a large role in the end, because throughout the majority of the story, it has no significance at all. As Hoshimo must kill the stone's nemesis when it is dark, he therefore must battle with time by napping during the day. Similarly, Kafka must compete with time, for if he doesn't, he risks the chance of the entrance closing before he has escaped. Perhaps the fact that time actually possesses significance in the last few chapters is no coincidence at all, but instead, illustrates that normality has been restored. With the entrance now closed and Kafka's prophecy behind him in the past, it seems that he can officially move forward. He no longer has to cope with the blend of the past, present and future, but can now embrace the present in the manner he decides is proper. Time is ultimately set into place with the image of Kafka's watch beginning to function again, and it paves the way for the clear outlook on life that Kafka seems to have in the end.

The Komura Memorial Library was an idyllic Eden for me, and Oshima's cabin in the woods reintroduced Thoreau-inspired concepts. Oshima was a mentor for me, a teacher above all else, and I craved eel after almost every reading. It was exceedingly easy for me to immerse myself in the world of text, reading close to 100 pages each day. And as I imagined myself submerged in the serenity of the woods, the fresh and detailed writing engaged all of my senses and made me feel that, as a reader, I really was a part of the story. I closed the book with a feeling of completeness, but more importantly, one that I could understand. And I truly feel that ultimately, that is what every great book aims to instill in its reader.

Doesn't come close to the "Chronicle"
Many years ago I read Murakami's "Wind-up Bird Chronicle" which left me absolutely spellbound. I loved the plasticity of its prose and the suggestive and surprising metaphors that where wrapped around the shadowy plot. Other Murakami novels that I have read since - "Hard-boiled Wonderland ..." and "South of the Border ..." - left me disappointed.

The same is true, I am afraid, for "Kafka". The story has been conceived as a darkly allegorical account of a young boy's coming of age, sexual awakening and initiation rite. The first two hundred pages are promising, if not at the same level of the "Chronicle". But then Murakami seems to get lost in his own narrative labyrinth and the story becomes a wearying sequence of dreams and "teleportation experiences" (by want of a better word). Lots of it is merely clever and gratuitous - not tightly woven into the plot - and it soon wears off (a small and obvious example is the choice of `Kafka' as the protagonist's name, the initial frisson of which quickly fades). As a result many of the twists and turns in the narrative, even if they were not exactly predictable, left me cold. To me none of the "Kafka"-stuff comes close to the deeply serious, compelling, unforgettable epiphany of Lt. Mamiya in the "Chronicle".

Neither is the prose at the same height of the earlier novel. There is too much that is simply mundane (after 500 pages of "Kafka" one has "a pretty good idea" (a typical Murakami turn of phrase) what range of options is available to Japanese for breakfast, lunch and dinner) and only seldomly Murakami achieves the poetic density of his best work.

Pity. But I'll keep looking out for a worthy successor to the "Chronicle".