The first book I read of his, excellent storytelling.

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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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4871 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 Review
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.
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From The Washington Post
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.

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Customer Reviews

Read at random
I guess from other reviews that I'm not the typical reader of this sort of book - some of the other reviews go way over my head, which might suggest that the book did, too. Unlike many readers, I'd never heard of this author, nor have I studied philosophy or metaphysics, nor did I appreciate any of the clever references to other works which I gather are in the book. So my review is based on the book alone without any external context or any expectations of this author at all. I picked the book up more or less at random from a public library shelf because it looked interesting.

The first half of the book had me sitting up reading in the early hours of the morning, it was that good. I'd never read anything quite like it and was fascinated to see where the story was going to go. I appreciated the book's readability too, with the author conveying complex ideas without getting bogged down in complex language. Some of the reviews I've read subsequently are less readable than the book itself, so don't be put off by thinking you need to be an intellectual to read it.

Unfortunately I felt that after the first half of the book, the sense of wonder began to fade and instead of being content to be caught up in the plot I was starting to wonder where it was going to go and how long it was going to take to get there. To be honest I hung in there for the last quarter mainly because I didn't want to abandon the book having come this far. It's not that the writing deteriorated or that the storyline wasn't still interesting, more that the characters weren't developing any further and it looked like they weren't going to. The plot just played itself out and I lost that "Wow, I can't wait to see what happens next" feeling.

Nevertheless, it's unlike anything else I've read and I did enjoy reading it. On the most basic level it's a fantasy which requires that you suspend your ideas about the nature of reality and, like one of the main characters, just accept what's going on without making judgements and perhaps without trying to understand at all. I can't say that it was an entirely satisfying read from cover to cover, but there were moments in which I was totally entranced. I will probably read more from this author, especially if I find that reality is getting a bit too heavy for me and I need a break.

By the way, cat lovers may need to be warned that there is one particularly unpleasant scene; I'm not entirely convinced that it was necessary and it is very disturbing.

Murakami in transition?
Kafka on the Shore is at once familiar and unfamiliar to readers of past Murakami stories: in story and in plotting it is reminiscent of past works of Murakami; the Tamura Kafka storyline is in many ways a re-telling of Hard-Boiled Wonderland, and the split narrative style also reminds one of that book. Indeed, many times throughout the book I found myself thinking that Kafka on the Shore felt like a kind of summation of Murakami's works, all the way from Hear the Wind Sing through After the Quake in terms of style and plot elements.

Despite the many familiar elements, there are several significant deviations from the usual formula, starting with the protagonist Tamura Kafka. Unlike the typical 30-something "everyman" familiar to readers of Murakami, Kafka on the Shore features the young and proactive Tamura Kafka and to the best of my knowledge is the first of Murakami's novels to be written half in the third person, giving Murakami a bit more freedom in telling this tale from different characters' perspectives. More important than narrative technique was Murakami's approach to the story: whereas many of Murakami's novels are full of a sense of loneliness and a feeling that the characters are chasing after something which is already beyond their reach, Tamura Kafka is very much in charge of his own destiny as his choice at the climax of the novel indicates.

Although Kafka on the Shore started off wonderfully, by the second half of the book, the plot became unusually linear and predictable for a Murakami novel. The Nakata/Hoshino plotline in particular was cryptic without the scope or wonder of Wind-Up Bird, for example. Oshima, one of the most interesting characters Murakami has created (and that's saying a lot) is sadly underused in the second half. Murakami's use of corporate icons and feminist figures is awkward and a bit forced. In general, what starts off with the potential to be Murakami's masterpiece falls a bit short in the end.

Part of the problem is that Kafka on the Shore feels like Murakami is undergoing a shift in style and in substance but it is a little unclear where he is trying to go to. Unfortunately, his latest novel, After Dark, does not clear up the issue either. As Murakami has aged, his protagonists have gotten younger (a 15-year old boy in Kafka and a 19-year old woman in After Dark) ... but they often seem like a middle-aged "everyman" trapped in a young person's body. It will be enjoyable to see what direction Murakami takes in the future, but compared to his works of the '80s and early '90s, Murakami's recent works have retained his energy ... but lost a bit of the soul that make a Murakami novel an experience greater than the sum of its parts.

To boldly go
Reading Murakami is a bit like going into therapy. The images and dreams can seem familiar and identifiable to others, but they are also full of personal meaning. Each book tightens the web of associations and memories for Murakami readers; as result they end up talking about other books in order to understand the novel at hand. (This is true with other writers as well, of course, but Murakami intentionally ventures into the dark psychological realm.) I loved this novel, and found it a very satisfying extension and refinement of his work, particularly Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Wind-Up Bird, and Dance, Dance, Dance. I particularly enjoyed the ending, the writer's usual area of weakness. But the book doesn't depend on the ending -- anywhere you enter, there are mental puzzles and verbal delights galore.

I dreamt more than usual while reading this book. Murakami sends me deep into myself, where I examine those feelings and forces that churn and charge forward, driving me to express my true self and to take control of my own life. As with some of the other books, I had the feeling that I was becoming more fully myself while I followed the developing situation. Much of the novel exists between two worlds, which resonated deeply with me because of the death of my mother six months ago and my heightened awareness of her lingering presence. I swam everyday when I was reading "Kafka on the Shore," and being in water was an ideal medium for coming to terms with Kafka's progress through the labyrinth of familial obligation, anger, and self-knowledge. I read Tony Kushner's "A Dybbuk" while floating in the pool one afternoon -- a play in which a "living soul" inhabits the body of his beloved. The rabbi entrusted with her exorcism fails and love triumphs in a very uneasy world: it felt like I was reading a gloss on "Kafka." I had just finished a surf novel, "Tijuana Straits," before I started this one, and I kept hearing echoes from that work (by Kem Nunn) echoed as well as sections of Richard Linklatter's first film, "Slacker." This is the process many go through reading Murakami -- all sorts of elements come to more vivid life and stick to the psychological fly-paper.

Like most Murakami novels, this felt improvised, as if he weren't sure where he was headed, but the prose was more polished and the story more buffed than the early novels. It seemed more like "East of the Sun" or the short stories, which is just fine by me. The national amnesia about the horrors of World War II was not explored as deeply as in Wind-Up Bird, but it was suggested enough to lead the reader to reconsider in light of current events in China and Japan. Among other things, Murakami is working things out in real time -- our time; as concerned as he is with the eternal, he is also writing quickly enough to let the present flicker through his words.

There are surprises, recollections, jokes, and profundities aplenty. This seems an excellent introduction to the world of Haruki Murakami as well as a step forward into the unknown that is his particular turf.