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: #3087 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-03
• Released on: 2006-01-03
• 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

First book by this author that I could not finish
I made it to about 50 pages from the end, but there just wasn't enough to sustain my interest. For the last half of the book I found myself losing interest in the characters and their fates. This is the fifth book of Murakami's that I have read, and the first that I could not finish. Obviously he has the skill and creativity to engage a reader's interest, and I was fascinated by aspects of the story, such as "Johnny Walker" but towards the end I just didn't care.

But Murakami's Short Fiction Has Social Messages
Murakami has performed a little magic himself. He's written a novel that is shorter than some of his short stories. The longevity of stories like "A Shinagawa Monkey" is to be measured by their influence on the minds of its readers, lasting long after the last paragraphs are experienced. Months after that story appeared in The New Yorker, I was still considering the effects that personal identification has on my thinking about who I am. Nothing similar is effected by Kafka on the Shore.

So much of this novel circles around surreal elements that the novel appears to be a demonstration, almost exploitative, of a fiction writer's license to make up things. I do not deny him that privilege by this complaint. In order to achieve a status among his contemporary fiction writers, one must produce full-length novels the titles of which readers will recite again and again over the years. However, we can recite "A Shinagawa Monkey" and "Where I'm Likely to Find It", wherein appear supernatural powers -- an ability by an investigator to pinpoint a monkey as a thief, a monkey who can steal from a girl's apartment, a monkey who can talk and feel contrite and articulate his jealousies, and a volunteer-investigator who surpasses all normal investigators in self-restraint. The problems of the world demand mature entertainments like literatures that reflect on human endeavor deeply, self-consistently.

But really what has Murakami in "Kafka" done to address societal challenges, as extensively as he has in his stories? We get acquainted with a truck driver and thereby extend our feelings toward truck drivers or perhaps all career drivers in general: they suffer backaches just to make a living, they work constantly, they have familiarities that put us at ease in otherwise weird situations. He has not defended art, nor specifically poetry, however. The artist sculptor going by the name Johnnie Walker is no exemplar of socially useful behavior. The haiku library that houses a region's generations' of poetry is not explored. Murakami is impatient to take us to his own miracles. His boy Kafka proclaims adoration at first for certain books but then for hundreds of pages while living there no longer adores for us specific books nor is seen actually indulging in any there. He's using the library as a hangout, an escape from his father. Are we using "Kafka on the Shore" for escape from a similar torment?

The purposes of literature demand defense in a day when businessmen are turning away from literature in droves, in favor of the more banal forms of entertainment: video, games, and on. Yet literature's greatest virtues--depiction of the interior lives of real humans and depiction of the different strands that intersect in real human's lives--is not worked out well here. We see miracles and legal testimonies that excite us. But how do different individuals in their inner lives take things like the testimony of the physicians at the beginning of this novel, interpret, and form views about them, cope with them? Literature from either a first-person narrator or a closely empathizing third-person narrator can inform of us this by convincing description. Non-fiction accounts cannot. Murakami, though, doesn't attempt this enough in general. Characters float around like ghosts, whisked around, as he makes his way to his next supernatural incident. I mean, Kafka awakens in blood stains yet his thoughts are not in any way projected on his environment. What is this projection? It is beyond the facticity of this here stain and this here inference that something must be done. The character must notice in the course of his investigation stains on carpets, expressions of horror on passersby. His feelings, even though the feelings of a naive youth, must be found all around as he gets absorbed in the challenges the incident creates.

I do not object to comic book surrealism; I simply request more from an author who is proven more in his short fiction.

Mind-blowing!
This book took me by surprise. I didn't anticipate a book required for my english class to hold such creativity and depth.The multiple stories intertwine to make an altogether incredible read and thought-provoking novel. It's definetly worth the time and mind power to get sucked into.