Kafka on the Shore

Unlike some of the other reviews, I thought the story dragged in the first two hundred pages or so, but he 'got on his bike' and really took us for ride that was breath taking and imaginative! As it said on the back on my book, "Cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a forest harbours soldiers... and there's a savage killing, but the identity of both the victim and the killer are a riddle". Add all the metaphysical inferences and meanings that will leave you with hours and hours of afterthought and you've got yourself another very good Murakami story. It's not perfect, however, because Murakami, as he often does, leaves quite a lot unexplained or, in the vey least, open ended, and you can be left little bewildered at the end. Sometimes, however, the best words that you want to write come from someone else. If I could find the right words, then this is what I would 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. "Very good". Yes, this is exactly how I would have said it. Sometimes other people have the right words to describe Murakami.

He is that sort of writer where he makes you think long after you have finished reading his book. Actually, I think, that Murakami tried a bit too hard towards the back end of his book by deliberately blurring the real world and fiction leaving the story (quite deliberately) open ended and unclear. But, that is Murakami and that is but one reason that explains his popularity in the world. He is very good at mixing the physical world with the metaphysical. I am not alone when it comes to this slight criticism because other people seem to agree too. "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". Publisher Weekly. You're happy to go along for the ride because Murakami has you in the palm of your hand, but at the end you don't always believe what has been written and clearly, you certainly don't understand all that has been written either. You probably don't always agree with everything that occurs either, but you do agree on one thing and that is that it's a great story. It's very good and easily gets 4 Stars!

This dreamlike, interwoven duo of narratives is a fantastic sampling of the works and style of Haruki Murakami, and provides a rewarding reading experience with a heavy dose of the bizarre. It will leave you pondering its several riddles long after you're done reading, and it practically begs you to pick it up and read it again as soon as you've finished.

Kafka on the shore is an intellectually stimulating read with several layers of meaning and Murakami has once again left me in awe of the depth and breadth of his philosophical and cultural knowledge. I'm especially fascinated by his knowledge of American culture, especially as related to literature and music. His works often send me in search of the music and books upon which he so eloquently expounds and Kafka was no exception. I thnk Murakami has taught me more about the appreciation of classical music and jazz than any music teacher I ever had.

I highly recommend this read and am confident that you will enjoy following the protagonists as they search for their missing halves. Though I would not recommend this as the single most ideal starting point for a first time H.M. Reader (for that I recommend The Wind Up Bird Chronicle), it's certainly not a bad choice and will likely leave the curious reader searching out Murakami's other works.

"This world is a metaphor... but for you and me this library alone is no metaphor. It's always just this library."

And this book may as well just be a book.

I'm at odds with what I want to say about this novel. It was certainly an enjoyable read—no section was difficult or boring, no prose was anything other than crisp and clear, even beautiful in parts. The surrealistic elements began in a fascinating and unapologetic way and ramped up to grab my attention and keep it til the very end. I feel like Murakami's prose bleeds confidence; he's a man who very much knows what he's doing, and is happy to take the reader along for a ride no matter where they're going.

I suppose my only qualms with Kafka On the Shore are the way it ended. I know that the purpose of surrealism and metaphor aren't always to give complete answers, but I felt like there was just a little too much we didn't learn by the end of the story. Kafka's journey seemed complete, but I felt like I was holding a few sad threads in need of ends—Johnny Walker's role and presence being the most notable.

As other reviews have mentioned, some of the characters and dialogue seemed a bit flat/unrealistic (though that's somewhat silly to say in a magical realism/surrealist book), and the constant allusions to cultural touchstones seemed a tad forced—but none of it in a particularly objectionable way. I was still on-board the whole way through. I specifically enjoyed the unique voices as characters gained prominence, Hoshino in particular. I'd be hard pressed not to recommend this book to someone else—it just might leave them scratching their head at the end. I'd happily read it again, however, and hope to dig into many more of Murakami's works in the future.

Reading this earlier Murakami novel after loving his more recent 1Q84 (Vintage International), I felt the presence of many similar themes and situations, but didn't find it as compelling.

Kafka on the Shore doesn't define its separate worlds as clearly as does 1Q84, but its characters move between varied levels of consciousness, alternating at any given time between real and surreal planes. As usual, Murakami doesn't provide readers with any explanation of what occurs, and I'm okay with that, but protagonist Kafka Tamura's physical and metaphysical journeys just didn't resonate with me as strongly as did those of other Murakami characters in previous reads.

The Oedipus complex is one thematic component from both Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84 in which Murakami goes a lot deeper in the former: Kafka literally runs away from a prophesy that he'll kill his father and have sex with his mother, a prophesy told to him at a young age by his father himself. In 1Q84, Tengo subconsciously fantasizes about a sexual encounter between his mother and another man that he imagines to have witnessed as a baby, and he struggles to believe that the man who raised him was his biological father, but the book's Oedipal undertones are less direct.

I enjoyed this book because I find Murakami's writing style addictive and I'm always curious to see what will happen next (his books are full of surprises and just about anything can happen), but overall I found it slightly disappointing. Perhaps I would've liked it more if I hadn't read 1Q84 first because I felt it suffered by comparison.

Kafka is probably one of the best novels I've read. A complete seduction of the senses. While I will admit to being a Murakami fan this book was my introduction to his writing, since then I've devoured a majority of his novels. I always find Kafka to be my favorite. I recommend this novel above his more recent work 1Q84 as a beginning novel. It's humor, wit, symbolism and vernacular writing style makes this book a fantastical journey through Japan following an estranged old man and Kafka. Murakami plays with the identity of darkness and the metatext of this book is outstanding. I would recommend reading Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis first to fully take away from this books intense symbolic references and inferences. Albeit this book can be easily enjoyed without the knowledge from previous books. I strongly suggest being an active reader with this book, look up the song's referenced, the book summaries or chapter summaries mentioned, you'll take much more from the book.

Story wise (without spoilers) it's an outstanding novel filled with individuality, mystery, love. Each chapter will leave a perfect cliff hanger to the next. Murakami mastered one's interest in turning the page to find out what has happened. I've devoured this book four times with over a hundred pages of notes (lit major) and still find things I hadn't seen before. This is the book that decided my graduate career focus.

I would also like to recommend Jay Rubin's book "Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words" also sold here on the store to those that wish to find out more about Murakami, his works and ideas bounced from Murakami's current translator.

A literary genius with talent on loan from God.

To read Kafka on the Shore is to weave through the malleable boundary between reality and fantasy, to meet philosophical prostitute, talking cats, and characters like Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders, to dream of the dialectics of Hegal and the continuous time of Bergson converging with the Oedipal complex, to journey into Haruki Murakami's imagination.

I want to know whether Kafka killed his father, whether the librarian was his mother, and whether he was dreaming when he met his mother. I want to know whether Nakata was just fantasizing that he could talk to cats. But as in Murakami's other two novels, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, reality and dream synthesize into a world that transcends truth or illusion. And Murakami takes us along his wonderland and shows what we too could imagine if we free our minds from the biases, the limits, and the cannots we have accepted as truth.

Reality almost seems sterile when we immerse ourselves in Murakami's surrealism. And I invite you to dream along with Murakami on a shore far into the sea of imagination where a song's lyrics echo back into reality.

I listened to this novel in the excellent recording by Sean Barrett of the English translation by Philip Gabriel. Kafka on the Shore is a Bildungsroman. On his 15th birthday our hero, who has renamed himself Kafka after the Check writer (Kafka means 'crow' in Check), runs away from home where he has been living in estrangement from his father and in the absence of his mother, who ran away years before. Is there an instance in Murakami of a father and son who get on? He is one of those Murakami young men who make a virtue for the reader of not knowing what to do with themselves. He is also running from dipus' curse delivered as extended by his father: that he would sleep with his mother, sleep with his sister, and kill his father. It is difficult to write about this novel without injecting spoilers, but I think I can say that whether Kafka fulfills or avoids his curse depends on what it means to say something really happens.

This novel is not speculative fiction like Science Fiction, nor does it create a coherent alternate world like fantasy, but there are unworldly departures from the commonplace.

It includes at least two touching love stories, and a violent murder by a reluctant murderer.

This is a long novel with several fully developed secondary characters. The most important is a man who as a child was traumatized in a strange event during the second world war, which is recounted in full, and involves something that suggest American bombing of Japan and as well the sexual fantasies of his grade school teacher. The victim grows up in a sense retarded, but able to converse with cats (Who can name a Murakami novel without a cat?) and his special powers enable him to effect the denouement. Another important character is a transsexual librarian who is a bit of an authority on everything and a mentor to the hero. Another is an uneducated truck driver who befriends the cat whisperer, learns to like Beethoven, and is treated for his good works to a hot prostitute who explains Hegel to him. His physical strength contributes to the denouement. So you see, there are many threads and arrangements blended carefully into the conclusion.

A secondary personage who has important role in the plot manifests as Colonel Sanders. He explains that he is neither a god nor a Buddha nor a person. Really, he is a sort of plot device, but utterly credible in another way, and teaches us something about the issue of character-driven plots and vice versa.

During the course of many trials and temptations, the hero spends some time in a distant forest that suggests purgatory but also suggests the Western Paradise of Pure Land
Buddhism.

The hero has some remarkable erections in unworldly circumstances. Can anyone name a Murakami novel without remarkable erections?

I feel I am failing utterly to give the tone of this novel. It must sound chaotic and self-conscious. It is not. It is orderly and full of surprising but inevitable plot maneuvers. It is serious, entertaining, and moving.

For me the key to apprehending reality in unreality lay in the character and action of lady Rokujo in TheTale of Geji, which the worldly-wise librarian is at pains to explain to the questing hero. Lady Rokujo is one of Genji's many lovers. The Buddhist psychology that underlines Lady Murasaki's characterization requires that each person have a ruling aspect, and allows people to have spiritual extensions of themselves, like ghosts. But these extensions may manifest while the person is alive. Lady Rokujo's ruling aspect is jealousy, and, without the corporeal Lady Rokujo even knowing it, her spiritual extensions slowly kills a competing lover.

It is in a world that includes such kinds of reality that Kafka undergoes trials and temptations and learns to be a person through many adventures both realistic and remarkable.

This is the second of Murakami's books that I've read, now—I definitely enjoyed this one more, and found it easier to read, perhaps in part just having now had a taste of the style of writing. I'll admit that there are definitely themes to Murakami's works that I can spot but cannot (yet, anyway) understand. That is, understand in order to be able to see why he uses such devices. But whereas after reading Wind-Up Bird, I found this frustrating, now I'm sort of intrigued. I feel like this is the kind of book that I'd need to come back to in a year, re-read, and see what I can take away from it at second reading. And then do it again. And again. And again. And maybe, one day, I'd stand a hope of making sense of these books.

Although, at first, I thought this was going to be over my head, I found that it was an exceptionally well written fantasy, albeit, probably one of the strangest I have ever read. The reader was nothing short of superb, handling the individual voices of the characters so well that I was always immediately aware of who was being portrayed, even before they were identified. There were really three parallel stories that occupied the pages. One concerned Kafka, another Miss Saiki and a third, Nakata. In the end, each of the stories will unite and connect, in some way, and the mysteries that unfolded will be solved. Each character, major and minor, was really fully explored, and the reader, while finding them to be a bit of a stretch of the imagination, will be able to see them in their mind's eye as real because of the skill of this writer.
Kafka, a fifteen year old junior high school student runs away from home on his fifteenth birthday. His mother and sister disappeared when he was four years old and all traces of them have been removed from the house. He begins his journey in order to escape his father's prophecy that he will, like Oedipus, murder his father and sleep with his mother and sister. He speaks with his (imaginary?) friend Crow, who appears when he needs him, to offer advice and is almost an alter ego. In his travels he is helped by many people who "march to a different drummer" and accept his unusual circumstances as they aid him in his efforts.
Nakata, lives on the public dole because he is dull-witted as a result of a strange illness contracted during WWII. However, he has a special gift. He can rescue missing cats because he has the special ability to speak the language of cats. When he becomes an unwilling accomplice to a violent act, he runs away and discovers he has additional magical powers which he accepts humbly, and seemingly, is unaware of their significance. He has no idea where he is going, but he just keeps traveling west because he understands that he will know where he is when he gets there. He, too, finds people very willing to help him in his quest, people who thank him for his positive effect on their lives, which makes him very happy. Magic is definitely afoot with spirits, talking cats, and mackerel, falling from the sky.
Miss Saeki was a young teacher, very much in love with her childhood friend. They are engaged. He is a soldier during WWII. During this same time, she takes her class on a trip to pick mushrooms in the forest when an unusual event takes place. This event prompts a serious investigation for which she gives testimony. The records of this event are sealed until 1986. When her sweetheart is murdered, during the war, due to a tragic error, she is distraught. She runs away and takes with her, her own secrets about the events that surrounded that strange day with her class in the forest.
Unbeknownst to each other, in some way, the characters are all connected and will all wind up in the town where Miss Saeki is now living. She is in charge of the special library housed in the home of her former fiancé. Each of these characters had been abandoned by life in some way and was searching for something, but they weren't really sure of exactly what that something was. They seemed to just know they had to search. So many peculiar incidents will occur during their quest, that the reader's imagination will be stretched to its limits. This talented author is unbelievably creative and will tie up all the loose ends harmoniously, as he leads the reader through the labyrinth of his story.
When the book ends, the reader will be compelled to simply sit for a few moments and think about what has been read. There were so many ideas presented, and they will converge upon the reader's thoughts. Common themes, which may not be noticed until the very end, will come to light, like the common thread of blood that occurred in each character's life, or the secret identity of one or another, or the significance of the magical characters with their strange names, or what the spirits really represented, or even why they were compelled to escape from their lives in search of something they couldn't define? Is that something still hidden in the end, or is it the obvious answer that is revealed? That is the question which will haunt the reader.

This was my 9th book by Murakami, but it is finally, and most definitely, the last. Other than 1Q84, they really don't have an ending. And all kinds of sub-plots or mysterious characters get left dangling at the end with no explanation or tie-in to the overall story. Things you wondered about throughout the whole book never get answered. For some reason, Murakami books are enjoyable to read when you're in the middle of the book, but you may as well skip the last chapter, because the ending - if you can call it that - will disappoint. This one had a little more of a conclusion than most, but it still pretty much followed that same pattern that left you wondering about all kinds of unanswered questions and sub-plots.

And it hit a new low in the disgusting category: a 15 year old having sex with his mother. And, of course, there was the usual sprinkling of his favorite - fellatio - which Murakami seems fixated with. Nothing wrong with fellatio, but enough is enough, I don't need the salacious details, and it adds nothing to the story. But the incest was the straw to break the camel's back. He's just a pervert with a vivid imagination who doesn't see the need to piece a story together and end with a conclusion.

Can't believe I read 9 of his books. I feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football that Lucy continuously pulls away.

Disappointed by the ending of every Murakami book that I read. The plot never ties together in the end. There are red-herrings, a convention of mystery, no speculative fiction, which means setups fail to have payoffs and things ultimately aren't explained or don't make sense. Still, I read him for the luscious prose style.

Beautiful. Challenging. Engrossing. Uplifting. Confusing. All of these words could be used to describe Kafka on the Shore, but there is one that I think can't be denied--masterpiece.

This is the story of a young man who runs away from home, but it is so much more than that. It's hard to describe what's going on in Kafka on the Shore, particularly since so much of the magical realism obscures reality and leaves the reader to decide exactly what is real and what is in the imagination of the various characters. I know that might seem like a negative--before reading the book, I certainly would have said it was--but I can assure you that it is not. There are moments of true emotion in Kafka on the Shore, and there were times when I was deeply moved not only by the beauty of the prose--a tribute to both the author and the translator--but also the beauty of the ideas. And that is a rare thing indeed.

This was my first foray into Murakami. It will not be my last.

Internationally bestselling author Haruki Murakami is well known for his use of the fantastic in his novels, to the point where they could quite easily be classed as fantasy or science fiction books; at the very least the literary world likes to brand them as works of "magical realism." Kafka on the Shore is an excellent example of this and a good book to start on for those not too familiar with his work, as the world is well grounded before the fantastic appears in the story, broken up into shortish chapters so the reader doesn't become lost. The book also features one of the darkest and most horrific scenes involving cats that I've ever read.

There are two storylines in Kafka on the Shore. One is of Kafka Tamura, who is sick of the pathetic excuse for parenting from his celebrity father, and runs away from home, embarking on his own adventure, meeting special and unusual people only Murakami could create. He is in search of the identity of his lost sister, and looking to find out who his real mother is. Kafka ends up working at a small library, where there is a middle-aged lady who could well be his mother, as well as a transsexual librarian who becomes a good and close friend.

And then there is Nakata, an old simple man who seems to be losing his marbles, but actually knows what he's talking about and has his own journey to go on and complete. He can also talk to cats. After dealing with a problem he heads on his journey that skillfully brings him into the Kafka storyline, but it is not until near the end of the book that the whole story is revealed and realized. While the story continues on a little too long, even though the story feels complete, Kafka on the Shore is a great example of the fantastic writer that is Haruki Murakami.

Originally written on December 30, 2011 ©Alex C. Telander.

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This is the first book by Haruki Murakami that fell into my hands and, even though I came to read more than a handful of his novels and short stories, I still consider Kafka on the Shore his best offering so far. I used to have my doubts about the merit of his work since the man is a star, but after reading this great novel I came to realize that he more than deserves his popularity.
The main characters in this book are actually no more than two: Kafka, a fifteen year old, who runs away from home before he "explodes", and Nakata, a somewhat mentally challenged old man who's a professional cat detective. These two diametrically different people are bound together with an unseen thread, which obsoletes time and turns the worlds of yesterday and today into one. They are in the centre of the plot, or rather they are the plot, but we also see a few other people hanging about or around, which have some important or not so important role to play in the story: the androgynous librarian Oshima that takes Kafka under his protective wings, just when the youngster arrives at the city; miss Saeki, who seems to be the link between the present and the past; the enigmatic man that goes by the name of Johnny Walker and drives Nakata to the limits of despair; and Hoshino, who for no apparent reason at all, and without giving the matter a second thought, decides to follow Nakata on his quest.
Murakami delivers a story that could be read as a fairytale; where people and times seem to merge together and where mystery sets the ground rules; where the answer to every question is always close at hand, but not the one we expect it to be. His heroes are people with passions and secrets; kept hostage by feelings of guilt and loneliness. They are as lonely as one can ever get. What if they cross paths? What if they feel at a time or another that they are close to each other? In the end it is the loneliness that prevails; it is only in isolation they can exist. The only one of them who seems to have a chance to break the rule is Nakata; because he lives every day as it comes; because, despite his desperate poverty, he is a symbol of the most simple and true values in life, values he can put into words, words he can put into action; unlike Oshima. The latter, a modern day philosopher, somewhere says: "Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas - none of them bothers me. I couldn't care less about the kind of banner they hold. What I cannot stand are empty people..."
Fate has some sad times in store for the heroes of this story; but it is fate that in the end brings about the final solution. As the boy that goes by the name of Crow, (Kafka in Czech), says: "Sometimes fate looks just like a small sandstorm that changes direction all the time. You change course and it follows you. You turn elsewhere and it adjusts".
This book is just like a journey around the two distinct worlds of the souls and of fantasy; a trip into the regions of truth that cannot find their place in the colorless reality we live in. An enjoyable read, by a master storyteller, which every now and then just seems to take the reader's breath away. Pure magic.

Kafka on the Shore is Murakami's most fully realized fiction, a master class on the glories and pratfalls of being human.

The novel is structured as two stories that twine around each other. Fifteen year old Kafka Tamura runs away from his oppressive father in Tokyo to a seaside town in southern Japan. He takes refuge in a small library under the kindly care of a transgendered librarian. There Kafka lives out a vividly imagined modern version of the classic Greek tragedy: he kills his father, maybe, mates with Ms. Saeki, a librarian he believes might be his mother, and sleeps with Sakura, an older girl who could be his sister. In his search for meaning and connection, Kafka plays out the dilemma of porcupines in the cold: huddling for warmth, then shuffling away in pain.

The other story strand follows Nakata, a mildly retarded man who cannot read but is plugged in to other realities: for instance, he can talk to cats and make fish and leeches rain out of the sky. Aided by his wonderfully rendered sidekick Hoshino, Nakata embarks on a mission to repair a hole in the fabric of time. His task overlaps with Kafka's quest to discover where in this world he truly belongs.

Murakami's genius lies in combining straightforward descriptions of everyday existence - eating, sleeping, shopping, screwing - with fantastic elements that are elaborate metaphors for hard to express emotional states. His characters tend to shuttle between the realities of daily life and fantasy worlds shaped by their emotional traumas. By trying to avoid the pain that comes from making yourself vulnerable to other people, characters like Kafka and Ms Saeki get thrown into shadow worlds filled with effects but lacking in substance. Their emotional blocks turn physical reality into a pale approximation of itself.

Murakami isn't perfect. Kafka on the Shore is a little too long, and there's too much pontificating about the nature of reality. But these are quibbles. This is a Nobel-level novelist's bold, brilliant, beautifully realized exploration of what you're signing up for when you choose to live in the here and now, tied to others.

This was in many ways a typical Murakami novel, a mixture of Japanese and Western pop culture, with product references worthy of watching television on a weekday in the US. There are learned references to philosophy and music, both classical and jazz, and the characters are engaging.

On the other hand, the story doesn't add up to much. Perhaps Murakami shot his bolt with The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. He certainly hasn't written anything that good since.

Although translated from the Japanese, this work pays homage to Western culture in its constant references to Greek mythology (in fact, much of the plot is Oedipus), western music such as the Beatles, classic Hollywood films like Casablanca, and symbols of western consumerism such as Colonel Sanders and Johnny Walker. A motherless teenaged boy kills his despotic father and runs away. Now maybe he did, maybe he didn't. It looks more like a "stand-in" for the boy - a mentally disabled older man who talks to animals -- actually killed the father. The boy hides out in a library and at a remote rural cottage. The run-away boy acquires a new best friend who is transgendered. Meanwhile the boy may or may not have had sex with not only his mother, but his long-lost sister as well. The plot is propelled by magical realism; it rains fish, so sometimes it's hard to tell what is real and what is mythical. Prophecy, fate, predestination and reincarnation are the themes in this book that the New Yorker characterized as "an insistently metaphysical mind-bender." A bit slow at times, but it kept my interest.

This was my first, and almost certainly, my last Murakami read. If I knew nothing of the author, I would assume this is a first effort, and that it's intended to be juvenile literature. The overriding theme is not terribly profound, and Murakami takes much longer to state it than he needs to. Of course, he spends so much of that time being overly didactic. Do we really need to hear about how great Schubert's D major sonata is for some three pages? Really, Murakami lets his ego creep into this novel way too much. He identifies specific films and works of music that he apparently loves and which therefore can help the rest of us on our paths to rebirth. And his imagery is at times naive to the point of being ludicrous. A character wakes up one morning to hear a shower of bird calls as the birds flit busily from branch to branch. He hasn't been outside or even pulled back the curtains yet! How can he know that the birds are flitting from branch to branch? Of course, this could be a problem with the translation, but it's pretty weak one way or the other. And then there's the character who suddenly remembers having written a book. What is the likelihood someone would forget having written a book? This is the weakest novel I've read in some time. Now I can easily believe that Murakami is someone who just suddenly decided at a baseball game that he could write novels.

At one point in Kafka on the Shore, a character says, "Strange inexplicable events are happening one after the other. Maybe it's just a series of coincidences, but it still bothers me..."

"Maybe it's a metaphor?" Another character suggests.

"Maybe..." is the reply, "But sardines and mackarel and leeches raining down from the sky? What kind of metaphor is that?"

And that, my friends, pretty much sums up my first venture into the land of Murakami.

You read correctly - fish and leeches rain down from the sky. A mentally impaired old man talks to cats - and they talk back. Colonel Sanders (as in KFC) shows up not to sell chicken but to pimp a philosophy student cum hooker. Japanese school children picnicking on a hill, suddenly, inexplicably collapse, unconscious, then wake up with no memory of why and how. And there are ghosts, which appear ordinary by comparison to what goes on in the rest of the book.

All of these strange events are somehow tied with Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old running away from his father and a curse of Oedipal proportions.

Murakami's world is a strange, dream-like, illogical one. If you like mysteries to be explained neatly and loose ends wrapped up by conclusion, you will be frustrated by Kafka on the Shore. I was never quite sure if we were going into science fiction, horror, fantasy, or the metaphysical realm. Murakami juggles all of these elements well.

Kafka on the Shore has meditative moments, but it's never plodding. If anything, I was constantly surprised. I'm still brooding, somewhat puzzled over the twists and turns in the story. "What kind of metaphor is that?" aptly explains my mood while reading this book.

Kafka on the Shore is uniquely imaginative - a wild ride worth taking.

3.5

Well...this has both redeemed my view of Murakami's writing and started to cement my opinion that he's just not an author for me. He has a lot of really interesting things to say, but he adds in a bunch of information that just seems to have absolutely no relevance to character development or plot. Maybe I'm just missing it, because he seems like he's very conscious of what he's putting into his writing so it just seems odd that he'd choose to do that seemingly without a reason. And while he has interesting things to say, his world view seems to be so opposite mine that I often have a hard time staying in the story and not just getting angry (although this was LOADS better than 1Q84 on that front

Just my point of view,

I just only read a few of Murakami's, first of all he has a good distinctive sense of taste in many art forms such as ; musics, paintings, literatures and many more, and of course his state of the art of brilliant style a way to tell the stories.

But i think he couldn't hide his brilliance even to the dumbest charachter he created (Even 'not bright Mr. Nakata', and come on Hoshino is not even an average Joe), so everyone in his books i've read seems all smart and the dumb one try so hard to be dumb. Look's like naturally he seems hard as well to unchained the charachters to his (himself) knowledges / preferences or should i say the contrast of the characters is not assertive, which his general knowledge is powerfully comprehensive and thoughtful.

The last few chapters kinda jumpy and i lost the thrill and the excitement, i don't think im gonna re-read this book again. I read "Strange Library" and "Afterdark" twice, and you can still feel the less-contrast of the charachters but more logic, although these both still would be my favourite of Haruki Murakami's piece, but overall there's nothing's wrong with "Kafka on the Shore".

It's a novel that you can't just read quickly. You need to absorb each word and live every sentence. The author moves the reader quickly between imagination and reality that I caught myself panting while reading.
It's very recommended for those who enjoy deep-thinking while reading.

Kafka on the shore follows two seemingly unrelated characters whose stories collide in surreality. The first character is a 15-year-old runaway boy who has renamed himself Kafka Tamura. Kafka runs away from his father for reasons that slowly reveal themselves as the plot thickens. He ends up in an obscure library, where he must overcome a dark curse. The second character is Nakata, an old man who suffered an injury as a child and lives as on a stipend for the mentally disabled. Nakata may not be very smart, but he can talk to cats, and he has an uncanny ability to accept surreal events at face value, thus providing a unique perspective to the strange plot twists. Kafka on the Shore highlighted the extreme effects alienation can have on a person's psyche. It had some VERY dark undercurrents (and even one scene of brutality that was quite shocking). It was a fascinating story, but after thinking about it for several days, I'm still unable to figure out quite what it meant. Perhaps it was only an expression of dark loneliness and nothing more? Whether I'm missing the deeper meaning or not, I greatly enjoyed reading my first Murakami book, and look forward to reading many more of these fascinating works.

Five stars? yes I think so, but it is a close call for me. I enjoyed the book, it moves along briskly, and the supernatural elements entrance. That said, it is also littered with brand names of soda pop, clothing, cars, everything, which to my eyes were jarring. I doubt in 100 years whether such brand names will have meaning, but footnotes can help.

Other reviews here have covered the story. It reminds me a little of "Pale Fire" by Nabokov in its narration, fantasy, and sense of dread. Murakami's writing is not complex, but his story is. Likewise it reminds me a little of "Lolita" with its first person narration and quest.

I recommend this book, but with reservations: the violence is chilling and nasty, the sex is graphic (but there is not lots of it), and the story is hard to follow. For me the trip was definitely worth it, perhaps you will agree.

The adjective inevitably attached to Haruki Murakami is "metaphysical." There certainly is some Hegel in Kafka on the Shore, delivered in the form of a lecture by a woman of the night after a "totally artistic act of [pleasuring a man]," and immediately after a quote from Henri Bergson. I'm told enrollment in philosophy Ph.D. programs shot through the roof, so to speak, after Kafka came out.

It could be that I'm just not bright enough, but I didn't really grasp the metaphysics in Kafka on the Shore. I'm similarly mystified by the supposed depth of Paul Auster's writings; I love The New York Trilogy and Oracle Night but the philosophy in each seemed to me an excuse for laziness. We're moving along in three meta-mystery novels, when it turns out that the lens turns in on the detective. Or we're hiding in a dark basement, when the lens turns in on the protagonist. It's an excuse not to end a story while pretending that you have.

Fortunately, I'm pretty sure that Murakami's supposed metaphysical genius says more about the laziness of book reviewers than it does about Murakami. Most of what makes Kafka on the Shore, and After Dark, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle enjoyable, is Murakami's facility as a storyteller. Wind-Up Bird is a constant tease, and so is Kafka on the Shore. We start Kafka with two my God, what the hell is happening stories which will play out, in parallel and intersecting ways, throughout the rest of the book. On the one side, we have a classroom full of Japanese children hiking off into the hills in 1944, as the country is being bombed to within an inch of its life. They reach a clearing and stop to take a break, and every one of them falls unconscious. Their teacher stands there, stunned, before racing back to her village to get help. All but one of those students regains consciousness within a couple hours. One of them falls into a coma and wakes up with an empty brain and with the ability to talk to cats. So ... that happened.

In the present-day part of Kafka we meet the novel's namesake. He's running away from home for reasons unknown. We know it has something to do with his cruel, distant father, but that's about it. Kafka may be crazy; he certainly carries a disembodied voice, whom he calls "the boy named Crow," that talks to him sometimes. "Kafka," by the way, isn't his real name. He's chosen it as part of the new identity with which he sets out on the road.

(Soon enough Kafka receives manual stimulation that seemingly comes from nowhere, thus furthering my hypothesis that Philip Roth made unexplained sexual favors, unaccompanied by reciprocation, respectable within "literary" novels. As the novel progresses, the manual stimulation makes a bit more sense, but I can't escape the suspicion that a lot of highbrow male authors think, "Unwarranted sexual climax? Don't mind if I do!")

On one path, then, we have the brainless cat-talker (who, by the way, refers to himself exclusively in the third person: "Nakata needs to take a dump" and so forth). On the other we have a really interesting little kid, setting out into the world without much of a plan. He ends up in one of those ornate libraries specializing in obscure forms of literature; it's the only place where he can expect to be left alone as he formulates a plan for his next steps. He meets its librarian, Oshima, and its head, Miss Saeki. Everyone's got some terrible secret. Sometimes the secrets are actually nauseating. The story is always gripping.

We flip back and forth between the two threads. They come closer together, and eventually the flipping happens every few pages. Murakami knows how to nail his dramatic pacing. You won't put this book down once you pick it up.

By the end, a lot remains unanswered. I think that's almost a definition of a "Murakami novel", but somehow it's less frustrating here than in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The storytelling more than makes up for any leftover plot holes. I'm unwilling to call Kafka "metaphysical," though. That word shouldn't just be a synonym for "vague."

Haruki Murakami is one of the most famous contemporary Japanese writers. He has gained a cult status worldwide, and his "Kafka on the shore" displays the characteristics that have made his literature famous: the Eastern sensibility filtered for the Western expectations. His combination of ancient legends and pop culture assure him to be read and loved outside Japan.

"Kafka on the shore" is a rollercoaster ride populated with strange creatures and bizarre events. Here old Greek tragedies and oriental beliefs bring exoticism to the narrative, that intertwines the stories of two characters. One of them is fifteen year-old who wants to be called Kafka. He flees his home, because his father makes a prophecy: the boy would sleep with his mother and sister and kill his father. He has never met his mother and sister. After a strange event when he was a child, Satoru Nakata acquired the ability to talk to cats, and have unusual dialogues with felines.

Murakami follows an annoying structural rigor that alternated first person chapters (Kakfa's) and third person ones (Nakata's). Both characters, at certain point, are on the road, and it is not a surprise that they story will meet in the end. It would be too bold of Murakami to keep both narratives apart. It feels like a plastered book, replete with anticipation since from early the reader is aware that The Big Meeting will happen.

A rain of fishes instead of water, or Kafka's alter-ego, to whom he refers as `the boy called Crown" added to Murakami's taste for symbols and metaphors may scare the reader, but, after all, it is an easy reading. Maybe we shouldn't expect too much of the novel - we should only lay back and give ourselves to the pleasure of the strangeness.

I read 1Q84 last year and Kafka on the Shore is very similar in theme and content yet the characters are very different, and the former is a much longer novel. Indeed, I found the Dickensian detail in 1Q84 to be tiresome at times. In this sense, Kafka on the Shore is a better novel, more compact and focused. Also, the heroes of Kafka on the Shore are more endearing and empathetic than are the heroes of 1Q84 who are somewhat cold and distant until late in the narrative. However, 1Q84 is a great novel, it just needed a great editor but Murakami has achieved such a level of renown that no editor dares can tell him what to do anymore. I don`t know how much editorial input there was in the creation of Kafka on the Shore but it is the greater novel for me. Murakami has been one of the great literary discoveries of the last few years for me and I have never been disappointed by his work and I can`t wait to read another one of his books.

Excellent book, excellently performed. Highly recommended for fans of Murakami. Has his signatures; characters that are unusual, intelligent, and introverted; an ominous dark(?) force that is hinted at but never fully revealed; an unusual love story with no "happily-ever-after". Ideal reading for INFPs.

What is a reader supposed to think when the back of a book such as Kafka on the Shore states that it is "A magnificently bewildering achievement...Brilliantly conceived, bold in its surreal scope, sexy and driven by a snappy plot...exuberant storytelling" (Independent on Sunday). Or that it is "Addictive" (multiple blurbs). Addiction is defined as "The condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or or involved in something" (theFreedictionary). Sexy implies that there is some type of sexually attractive person or activity in the book. However, what these two words mean in book blurbs is quite different than what their dictionary definitions, and of the two only addictive might apply to this novel by Haruki Murakami.

The premise is that the fifteen year Kafka is trying to escape an Oedipal prophesy, passed on him by his father, and ends up in a library with helpful, but unusual employees. There are many incidents, some of which involve sex, but none of which could be described as particularly sexy. They are perhaps sad, violent, or disturbing, though.

Another narrative thread follows a rather simple elderly man, Nakata, who has the unusual skill of speaking with cats, and by this means locating the occasional stray feline. The paths of Kafka and Nakata never actually cross, but their stories are intertwined with each other.

The end of the book is quite open to interpretation. There are unanswered questions, and the reader must be willing to either tolerate ambiguity or form hypotheses that are satisfactory.
[...]

Kafka on the Shore

On his 15th birthday a boy decides it is time to run away from home. He adopts the first name of Kafka while keeping is last name Tamura. After taking some money and other odds and ends from his father Kafka boards a bus in Tokyo and leaves for Shikoku which is south of Tokyo...

Nakata was involved in a strange phenomenon as a child during World War 2. The event left him in a coma for some time. After waking he had forgotten everything including who he and his family were and how to read. Years pass and Nakata is now an older man and still cannot read or write. He can however talk with cats and uses this unusual gift to locate missing cats in and around the City in which he lives.......

This was my first experience with Haruki Murakami and it was a very enjoyable one. Murakami's writing is heavy handed with metaphors, analogies, and symbolism. There are also a lot of metaphysical elements to his writing in Kafka. This book and Murakami for that matter is definitely not for everyone. The story did not unwind along a typical plot line, and other elements of the story which to say the least will come across as very unusual and will likely turn some readers off. The story isn't an action packed novel and it isn't full of explosions but the writing was great and just seemed to flow seamlessly and kept me interested throughout.

The Good: The writing overall very good. Murakami used an atypical style. Half of the book (Kafka's chapters) are written in the first person point of view and the other half (Nakata's chapters) are written in a third person point of view. I liked that the story didn't follow a typical plot line. It kind of reminded me of Stanley Kubrick's stories and how they unwind in that there isn't an ultimate goal for the characters. The story just examines the characters for a particular period of time. As mentioned this book is heavy in metaphysics which I found interesting but may not work for other readers.

The Bad: Nothing memorable. There are some elements to the story that some readers may find unusual to say the least but I can't give details without giving spoilers.

Overall: If you can handle the metaphysical aspect of this book pick it up and give it a try. It is definitely worth reading.

I admit that I had never heard of Murakami until I began to see ads and reviews for 1Q84. I decided to start with an earlier work. I got about 25% of the way through Kafka on the Shore, trying to decide if I liked it or not. Then it didn't matter, because I couldn't stop reading. I'm a big fan of Vonnegut, Brautigan and Bukowski, but I had never read anything like this. After about two more chapters, he made my all time fave list. This guy can WRITE. The dreamlike quality and skillful storytelling lure you into a false sense of sparkly fun, but this guy is dead serious about fiction.
I can only wonder,,, if it is this good in translation, how sublime must it be in his original Japanese.
Now I have to buy Rosetta Stone software...

Haruki Murakami's masterpiece of multiple forms is difficult to pin-down, even for the basic the store review. Supposedly taken from the title of a famous pop-song by a fictional one-hit wonder, Kafka on the Shore is hypnotic in its prose, gripping in its depth and as lucid in its intrigue as any platinum selling piece of music could ever be, or promise.

But maybe that's what Murakami was suggesting on a few levels ... the power of music, the power of a dream or the power of a strong metaphor. Either way, he succeeds here, and does so with such a deft and trusting hand, that you can't help but not feel confronted by your own trust that you've put forward as a reader with every turn of the page. Rarely does an author give so much to a piece of work as Murakami does with the vagabond tale of young Kafka and the dutiful speaking cats.

Kafka on the shore is the book that everyone wants to write, it is the book that everyone wishes they had the ability to write. It's the book that modern civilization has been building up for, or at least it was when it was written. Taking the suggestion of the author and re-reading it several times, I find it to be just as compelling now as it was the first time I experienced it. And experienced is probably the best word. It's made of the stuff that built the pyramids, or the statues on Easter Island or the insight (or madness - take your pick) needed to paint The Starry Night or craft Beethoven's Archduke trio.

Murakami continually shakes off his detractors like a sleeping hobo, shakes off the pesky fleas in the cold of night, only to wake the next morning and commit himself to the impossible with vigor, proving the world is not right and something really does not look well upon the face of our beloved Colonel Sanders as retort.

With such a loyal fan base these days, Murakami wins the pennant - where other writers, like Carlos Castaneda, have failed to convince you that the world that they're describing is both real and tangible, no matter how many cracks they may take at it. Haruki Murakami hits home runs every time.

This novel follows Murakami's tradition of using disparate storylines which eventually run together in magical ways. Much like _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles_ and _Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World_, Murakami sets up two very different storylines and lets them slowly merge together over the course of the novel. First, we're following a student who runs away from home after being told of a heinous fate (a youth who is, in Murakami style, very disaffected and lacking outward emotion but who has great taste in literature) and then an old man who talks to cats (and they, of course, talk back).

The way these storylines converge is, of course, the drive of reading the novel, but just like in other Murakami works that deal in magical or absurd elements, the novel always focuses on the reactions of characters who are immersed in situations that are beyond them. Murakami can be frustrasting to some in using this method, for magical elements often go unexplained and remain mysterious to the end, but this is simply because the meaning or rationale of the magic is not as important to the narrative and the exploration of the characters, who often have to make choices that will define their fates and themselves. Since Murakami's protagonists are often on a search for identity or emotion, explanation of the elements that bring them there often fall by the wayside.

It is fitting that Kafka should be a central element of this book, for Murakami's writing style is very akin to Kafka's in that he demands your attention on his characters rather than on his situations. The classic question asked of "The Metamorphosis" is "Why did he turn into a bug?" Though I think the answer is provided in the entirety of the work, the more pertinent answer is, "He just is--what's going to happen next?" Murakami is the same. A man who can converse with cats, or who searches for a flat stone that will open a portal at the proper time, is secondary to how these events affect the characters of the story, and in that respect, Murakami is wonderful.

I would still recommend books like _A Wild Sheep Chase_ and _The Elephant Vanishes_ over this one, for it does drag on a little midway, but this is still magnificent work.

Some authors hold unique values which caress readers, even if the magic is a refrain from previous novels. Murakami, like Rowling or Tolkien or King, delivers us to worlds derived from his highly imaginative mind's depths - a journey which we gladly seek to follow.

One recurring theme we see is the even versus odd chapter braiding. As the pages and plot progress, the seemingly unrelated tales enclose and eventually converge. There was a reason for the even chapters tales of Nakata to be related to the odd chapters of Kafka - in fact the relation is deeply rooted. Fatalistically or otherwise, the seemingly small world overlaps in boundless ways. The back and forth of stories remind us of "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World."

The even chapters are about Nakata - a boy traumatized during WW II who in today's world converses with cats, creates rains of leeches and fish, and has mystical powers with a stone. His cat work reminds us "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle."

Nakata's sleep marathons remind us of the almost comatose Eri of "AFTER DARK." These sleeps make me wonder if Murakami personally has encountered deep depression wherein your body lies dormant or victim to the illness's demands.

Ultimately, opposites attract - Nakata and a truck driver become best of friends. In "AFTER DARK," pimps befriend a suburban teenager staying out after her parents' proclaimed curfew. Perhaps the strangest couple are in the odd chapters. The odd-chapter narrator - 15-year old runaway Kafka Tamura - befriends the young and socially unaccepted Oshima: a transvestite or transgendered hemophiliac androgynous woman who appears as a man and sexually lives a homosexual man's life. Sexual deviance is something also addressed in "AFTER DARK."

Book worms Kafka and Oshima have great readers-digest talks wherein Oshima's boiled down versions of Greek tragedy depict or symbolize Kafka's issues: most importantly his Oedipal doom pronounced icily by Kafka's father to the young man when he was of elementary school age. To avoid that prophecy, he runs. But, is it the running away that ignites the prophecy's fate?

In the end, Kafka's life inevitably collides with Nakata for what appears to be a cleansing. Getting there may have been prolonged, and the inevitability of this collision may have been too many pages known - and such truncated detail of their convergence may be what lowers this review from 5 stars to 4. Otherwise, it was fun, and in a truly Murakami bizarre manner.

This is the second book by Murakami that I have read (Hard-Boiled being the first). As a reviewer, I fall to the negative. Irrespective of the imaginativeness of the plot, or the themes involved, I found the writing, simply, to be terribly clunky, and at times quite banal. The shifts to philosophical conversation feel forced, stylistically lacking any elegance (or sophistication), and disjointedly inserted into the flow of the story. The sex is so point-blank as to be humorous -- and not in a good way. And at times the language and delivery is flat bad (pg 326 in the hardback edition for example). Though in honesty, I wonder how much this is due to the translation: and frequently the writing feels like it was clumsily translated, with not enough attention paid to the style and flow of the words, sentences and paragraphs.

As a reader, I have yet to see what distinguishes Murakami from popular fiction: both novels seemed to lack organic unity. Imaginative, yes. But on the level of the writing, is it really any better than generic fantasy? (Or am I being denied that artistry by the translations?) Unable to answer that question, I offer this simple summation: I was unimpressed (having forced my way through the last quarter), though reserving final considerations of Murakami's work until a later date (possibly until after a full translation of Wind-up Bird becomes available).

Five stars and then some. Sometimes, you'll read a book and wonder how the author managed to be so brilliant. This is one of those books that raises that question.

In (very) brief, the book depicts two parallel storylines: that of a teenager who has run away from home and that of agiing man who, though he seems simple, posseses some remarkable abilities. The range of supporting characters is wide, and they are all well-drawn (with the possible exemption of the young Sakura, who is not so much enigmatic as she is simply a bit thin); Murakami has tremendous skills in character development: each character is well-rounded, well-developed, and speaks in a unique voice. All of the main characters also tend to wrap up their own trajectories, which is a feat (tying up all the loose ends, which is especially a formidable task in a novel as long and involved as this one) that many novelists never seem to grasp.

The plot itself is, as mentioned above, far more complicated than can be outlined in a review. What a potential reader needs to know is that the plot never becomes entangled and that the reader never becomes lost. There are plenty of points of metaphysical speculation, and the plot is all the richer for them; they are part of the novel's lifeblood. This is not navel-gazing; Murakami weaves them into his plot in order to make us reflect not only on the magic realism world of his characters but also on our own being-in-the-world. Reading this novel is NOT a passive activity but is instead one of active engagement.

Above all, reading this novel is enjoyable. Murakami has given us a page-turning plotline, one that keeps us asking what on earth could be coming next. He has given us likeable main characters, ones we want to follow into the next chapters. He has given us a world where the impossible is possible, and we want to extend our stay there. He does this all in an engaging, frequently shifting, narrative voice that keeps the novel cohesive and steers us onward.

Translator Philip Gabriel also deserves mention for his lively translation into English. Puns, jokes, idiomatic expressions, and slang all come through loud and clear in English. They style of the novel comes through in a natural voice, one that is never contrived or bland.

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.

I am a huge HM fan, I've always considered the man a genius, and definitely one of the greatest writers of our time. On "Kafka on the Shore" Murakami re-invents himself, writing a book that is very bold, original and unexpected. This is one of those books you cannot put away untill you finish it. And even afer you're finished reading "Kafka", you'll think about it quite a lot, and will be eager to talk with other people who've rear the book, about it. Why? Because HM decides to end this book in a way where most of the questions remain unanswered! He leaves it to the reader's own imagination to answer many questions...

As usuall, Murakami creates great and lovavle characters, people who are unique and you can indentify with. Unlike many think, Kafka is NOT the only hero of this book. There are 2 other ones, and they are the ones you'll fall in love with - the unfogettable Mr. Nakata (a unique old man, who is simple minded because of an even that occured in his childhood) and his new-found friend Hoshino (a young truck-driver, with a troubled past, who discoveres himself through his trip with Nakata). A few other characters appear all through the book as well. The plot is captivating, it envolves so many elements of fiction, reality, spirituality, love, romance. and more... You'd think that noone is capable of putting all those elemnts together into one book, but apparantly Murakami IS. This is a story about growing up and descovering yourself. This is a story about love and passion, that cannot excist unfortunately. It's a book about sadness, and loneliness. About escaping... A book about dreams.. About friendship... About loyalty and true belief... You can add on to this list... Haruki Murakami is one of this age's greatest and most original writers (yes, I am saying it again!), and he proved it once again on his boldest book. You won't be able to put this book down, and even though you might end up being confused at the end (actually you WILL end up being confused), it doesn't take a think away from the book! Because sometimes, a sign of a great book, is the one that makes you think. A lot. You become the writer yourelf...

Bottom line is, that this is a uniqye piece of work of a true genius. A book that will make you think, a book that will make you sad and happy alltogether. And most of all, a book that will make you believe.

I finished this book quite some time ago, and it's taken me a while to review this book, because frankly, I've just been at a loss of how to write a lucid and representative review. I felt tongue-tied and "writer blocked" in the afterglow on this spellbinding adventure. Murakami took me to realms I have not reached with books for a while now, and which I am still gently floating on. I finally did decide to write though, because I think it's imperative for me to document how I felt about the book and really try and impress upon other bibliophiles that they must, must, MUST read this!

The two fundamental themes of the book are simple, and in fact, quite clichéd: one can run, but not escape, and life needs to be dealt with; and that every person has a purpose and a destiny to fulfil. The way these themes are illustrated is, however, far from simple, and to do so, Murakami shares with us two tales: one of a precocious fifteen-year old boy who leaves home in an attempt to escape his oppressions, and the other of a mentally challenged old man who needs support on many fronts to just go through daily life, but has curious abilities like being able to converse with cats and making fish rain from the sky. Both the protagonists undertake fascinating physical and metaphysical journeys which inevitably weave together at the end, but in very unusual and interesting ways. Accompanying them, or somehow associated with them, on these journeys are just a handful of other characters, who while clearly playing a supporting role, are essential to the "success" (as in some logical conclusion) of the journeys, and are enchanting in their own right.

Murakami is very successful in illustrating the key themes of the book by the end (and in fact through most of its course), even though the plot is full of events that are oftentimes difficult to follow and challenge ones understanding. The book clearly demands a suspension of physical belief (refer fish example above), much in the vein of the magic realism of Marquez and Rushdie, but somehow, it doesn't feel the same. Similarly, while it deals extensively with the abstruse and the subconscious, it does not feel like surrealistic. Instead, all the unreal parts feel very natural, and it's very easy to accept them, just like it's easy to accept the myriad of contradictions that Japan (where this book is set) seems to be. Pulling this feat off is one of the most admirable stylistic achievements of this book. Another superb aspect of this book is the characters that Murakami has created. The breadth of the characters from the two protagonists through the hilarious avatar of Colonel Sanders to the confused gay "woman-in-man's-mind" is only matched by the depth of exploration of each character. The characters draw the reader into their minds and lives, allowing the reader to understand and empathize with them to very great extents, which is remarkable given the complexity and unreal nature of a lot of the characters.

The one aspect of the book which I can imagine some readers will find frustrating is the number of events, fringe characters, situations, dialogues, and sub-plots that seem to have no bearing on the main story or the plot. I, personally, learnt a new lesson from Murakami's narrative escapades and fertile imagination. Murakami very explicitly talks about metaphors throughout the book, and I think it has a purpose. The purpose was exactly to help the reader get rid of conventional thinking and reading approaches. After being perplexed for a while, I realized that all these inexplicable things were themselves metaphors, or analogies, or abstract concepts, which needed to be accepted as such without being taken literally. Once you stop doing that, and just feel them and the impact they make on your mindset rather than looking for literal bearings on the story, everything falls into place and the reading gets taken to a new level of beauty altogether. I think this is the greatest strength of the book, not its greatest weakness, and would urge readers to take this approach so that they can truly relish this wonderful adventure.

In conclusion, I strongly recommend reading, and even owning this book. I can easily imagine that this is a book you will want to go back to again and again, if not for the whole book, for many small aspects at least. Have fun!

It has been quite a long time that I have been interested in reading a Murakami novel, just never got around to it until now. Wow, I just finished "Kafka on the Shore" and immediately began reading "After the Quake". This book left me mesmerized, lying awake at night thinking about the real and surreal events that I just read.

I've read most of the reviews about "Kafka" and many of them compare it less favorably to other Murakami novels. Fortunately, I cannot bring that comparison to my view of the book. As I move to other Murakami novels, I'll be better able to assess how "Kafka on the Shore" compares to his other novels.

The story focuses on two primary characters. Kafka, a 15 year old boy from Tokyoruns away from home (and his father) and winds up in Takamatsu, "educating" himself by reading books on a variety of subjects. Ultimately, he befriends the library clerk and learns of the head librarian, Miss Saeki and her tragic past.

Nakata is an elderly Tokyo resident who was permanently "disabled" by a bizarre WWII incident. While he doesn't function well socially, Nakata's unique ability is to talk with cats and cause fish to rain from the sky.

"Kafka on the Shore" has some of the most hilarious and inventive scenes in modern literature. Hoshio, Nakata's traveling companion, encounter with Colonel Sanders continues to keep me smiling.

The only thing preventing me from giving the book 5 stars is the final 50 pages. I felt Murakami veered a little too far into the metaphysical over the last 50 pages and could have more tightly wrapped up the ending than he did.

All in all, this is one of the more satisfying books that I have read recently and I look forward to enjoying Murakami's other novels.

This is my first time reading Japanese author Haruki Murakami - and it will definitely not be my last. Kafka on the Shore is quite enigmatic, and the story is such an origial tale with enormous seductive powers. The novel consists of two intertwining stories featuring 15-year old run-away student Kafka Tamura and retired feline-loving simpleton Nakata. They are both on a journey, but for different reasons. The coming-of-age story of Kafka is the perfect compliment to Nakata's "exit-of age". Don't worry about me giving away the ending - mostly because the author himself dosn't seem to be giving it away. Suffice it to say it is a modern Oedipus tale sauteed with plenty of surreal twists served over a steeming order of nail-biting suspense.

I have recently read too many novels where there are lots of "mysteries" and overly constructed surprises only to have a conclusion where it is all nicely tied up and neatly explained - and you are supposed to be surprised as to how it all was really connected. It is becoming such a tired and quite predictable formula. This story, however, will not give you the answers like tomorrow's newspaper will give you the solved sudoku puzzle.

In a certain way, Murakami reminds me a bit of Kundera (my all-time favorite author). The characters are compelling, the descriptions acute, yet elusive, the emotions raw and brutally honest, and the sense of mystery unapologetically lingers long after the story ends.

As far as the translation is concerned, it did seem a bit "over-translated" at times. It seemed artifial to read about dollars instead of yen, and the colloquial expressions often seemed too American...However, I don't speak any Japanese, so I cannot be too critical - I can just offer my sense of the translated text.

I cannot wait to read more from this Japanese Kundera...

I don't have the history of having read Murakami at all before this book so my review will clearly not compare this to any of his other works. Likewise, I'm not going to write much more than a token review here as many of the reviewers have already covered much more ground than you need to weigh the pros and cons of this book. What I will say is that I was blown away. This will go up on my bookshelf next to Life of Pi, various Rushdie novels, Vonnegut, and so on. It is one of the best books I think I've ever read.

This is not a book for everyone, at every stage of life. If I had picked up this book 6 months ago it wouldn't have worked for me. Call it part of the magical realism or metaphysical allure of the book itself, or more practically call it good timing. I'll go with the later and say that sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. The hints of plot itself you can glean from the print reviews above or other reviews posted here. What I will say is that the book is extremely well written (and really, impeccably translated) and is steeped in easy-to-read culture. It is alluring, and creates a sort of mystical world than one might get if you were to cross a Rushdie novel and Jonathan Carrol. In short, nothing short of remarkable.

I don't know what his other books hold but if this is not on par with some of the others, as some reviewers suggest, then I simply cannot wait to pick those up, as they must be nothing short of remarkable.

I have read ever single book Murakami has written and he still has the power to engage and engross the reader even though you basically know what's coming-yet have no idea how it will happen.

This work takes several of Murakami's trademarks and sharpens the devices to a fine edge. The urban anomie that characterizes all of his novels is on display--though here in a venue well outside the normal world of Tokyo. The intertwined stories--here of a teenage runaway and an old survivor of a freak wartime "accident"--that ultimately intersect in unexpected ways. The characters that are weirdly unnatural yet completely normal. The aspects of mystical realism-- Nakata, the old fellow in the second story strand can talk to cats: several WW II vets appear still living--if that's the word--in a timeless world adjacent to ours in eerily vacant circumstances--that somehow seem perfectly normal circumstances. All of that is on display wielded as a philosophical journey by a master craftsman.

This is a tale that involves loss of personality of a character who nonetheless captures our imagination with his unique talents and worldview, another that is the picture of internal discipline yet is probably schizophrenic, another who's real gender is totally at question. In many ways the most riveting character may be a boy in a painting whom we never know as anything other than a boy in a pointing. Not the standard mainstream fare yet Murakami takes us on their journey and we willingly go because we feels all of their pain and angst as they do.

In point of fact I'd rate this book just a hair behind The Wind Up Bird Chronicles. That's pretty rarified territory. It's a place you want to experience. Read this book.

Upon finishing Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, it is hard to put into words what feelings the reader experiences. Whether you enjoyed it or not, you will most likely be surprised, confused, and/or even teased. What ultimate attitude you develop towards the novel - fascination or frustration, love or loathing, a thirst for more or something to rinse the taste out - will differ person to person, but exactly why you feel that way is probably the same.

As with his earlier work, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the chapters alternate between two parallel storylines that gradually intertwine to create one narrative. In one we follow a 15 year-old bookworm calling himself Kafka as he runs away from his father, and in the other we search for a lost cat with an old, perhaps somewhat neurologically underdeveloped, part-time cat finder/whisperer named Nakata. It should be noted, right off the bat, that if you do not like stories in realistic universes in which unrealistic things occur without cause, you should not read this novel. A lot happens that defies logic, and Murakami offers no reasoning. Likewise, many questions are left unanswered and some connections remain unmade by the book's conclusion; or if they are, they definitely are not done so in an obvious fashion. As long as you do not mind being remorselessly perplexed though there is some great story-telling, thought-provoking themes, and exemplary magical realism here.

The two storylines ebb, flow, and sync up better in this book than the parallel narratives in Hard-boiled Wonderland, so the ride feels smoother and easier to follow in that sense, but the open-endedness and interpretation of key character points by its conclusion will either compel readers to start the novel over again or throw it in a wastebasket. The only actual objective criticism I have would be that some of the dialogue feels a bit cliche (see: the more intimate conversations between Kafka and Miss Saeki), and some of the characterization seemed a bit off (see: Hoshino, the uneducated truck driver who suddenly is able to eloquently muse over classical music). Overall though, this book shows a strengthening in both Murakami's writing style and abilities. Perhaps the at-times rudimentary structure of sentences can be chalked up to the ever-present difficulties in maintaining analogous expression through translation.

Speaking of translations, here is a fun fact: after the novel's release, Murakami's Japanese publisher invited readers to submit questions about the book's meaning to its website. Murakami personally replied to about 1,200 of the 8,000 questions received. Unfortunately, these responses have not been translated into any other languages. On the bright side, the mere existence of such a database at least reassures me that I am not dumb or oblivious, and can peacefully focus on enjoying the book's fragmented nature instead of being overwhelmed by it.

John Updike has called this book a "metaphysical mind-bender," and I think that pretty much sums it up. The chapters alternate between the seemingly unrelated stories of Kafka Tamura (and his alter-ego, Crow), a 15-year-old boy who runs away from home to find his mother and sister; and Satoru Nakata, an older man who lost the use of much of his mental faculties during an incident as a boy (a story in itself!), but gained the ability to speak with cats. In my opinion, any novel that features speaking cats (each with their own personalities) automatically gets points.

Soon it becomes clear that the two plots are interrelated, in a fantastically surreal, and sometimes confusing, plot. Music, sexuality, Oedipus, fate, self-sufficiency, friendship, and nature all play supporting roles to Kafka and Nakata's leads. It's definitely a fun, sometimes challenging read that requires you to piece together riddles without solutions and take your imagination to a different plane.

It would be hard to try to summarize the plot or meaning behind the book, because I have a feeling that it could be interpreted in many different ways. No matter what you take away from this book, you will undoubtedly enjoy the rich characters and elegant writing, as well as the truly fascinating idea that the planes of existence aren't as separate as you may think.

If you are on the lookout for a beautifully-written novel that will requires you to stretch your imagination to the limit, I say look no further.

I picked this book with the expectation of reading something different. I wasn't disappointed. Murakami's greatness is not in the prose or in the structure, but in the story itself. With simple language and lots of dialogs, he delivers a compelling novel, deep with meaning and interesting intersections. Like many readers, I was wondering what kind of novel this is while reading the book. And it's true that it's hard to define. At the end I had the feeling of looking at a painting and imagining a fairy tale from it. The end of the book hints in this direction, but you will find much more here.

The one big complain I have is that the characters don't always come across as convincing as they should. This may be a translation issue (I read the French version), but it still subtract from an otherwise very convincing narrative. Great novels make you fall for its characters, love them, hate them, emphasize with them. There is greatness in this book, but some deficiencies still remain.

Now I know why this book is on the 1001 books to read before you die list. It is an amazing and vivid book that explores how one finds oneself when all is perceived lost.
In this book, a 15 year old boy who calls himself Kafka runs away from home, and perhaps through fate or destiny, finds himself at a privately owned library with its own secrets. He is running from something that it is very important he avoids, but no matter how far you run, can you really escape fate?
Meanwhile, an aging man who had an accident when he was young that left him a blank slate makes his own journey. Strange things have a habit of happening when he is around, but he is compelled to make his journey, although he doesn't know where it will take him and exactly why he has to make it.
These two stories interweave each other with rich descriptions, a bit of magical circumstance, and lots of music. Classical music is described throughout this book while the characters are learning more about themselves and their capabilities. It made me want to listen to Schubert's piano sonatas and Beethoven's Archduke trio very much.
This is my 3rd Murakami, and it didn't disappoint. It is very deep reading in places because so much of it is introspective, but I loved going on the journey with these characters. A wonderful read.

Kafka on the Shore is heavy-laden with interesting and unusual characters. The most important ones are well developed and engaging; they people it's easy to like and with whom one can readily identify. Yes, there is one really unpleasant, even frightening character who casts a long and malevolent shadow, and whose motives are unclear. Nevertheless, from page to page, the folks with whom the reader spends most of his or her time are, even if a bit off-beat, quite charming: the charm of innocence, the charm of uncorrupted youth, the charm of easy going self-acceptance, the charm of one whose eyes are opened to the wonders of the world for the first time.

These intriguing and attractive people, moreover, are doing interesting things, engaged in endeavors and exploits that hold our attention and keep us guessing as to what will happen next. Surprises, most more or less pleasant, but some sad and confusing, are common occurrences. Until near the novel's end, moreover, these are not the sort of events that wreck the flow of the narrative; the author avoids leaving the reader thematically lost and guessing just what is going on and where we are headed. It's true that even early on there are some pretty odd occurrences that defy easy interpretation. Given their context, however, they seem to fit, sometimes precisely because they are so unusual and even funny.

From the beginning, Kafka on the shore is a vehicle for mysticism. The protagonist and narrator, a fifteen year old boy who has adopted the name Kafka, is advised and urged on by an unseen character referred to as "a boy named crow." For better or worse, this mysterious source of unrefined wisdom recurs, though not frequently, throughout the novel. It's difficult to get a handle on just who or what he is, maybe an alter ego for Kafka, or just Kafka advising himself. After all, Kafka's just a kid, and throughout the book we are repeatedly reminded of the importance of metaphors, and some of them are pretty obscure.

Mr. Nakata's ability to speak with cats can be construed as another unexplained mystery that we learn about early in the story. Given Mr. Nkata's naivete' and history, however, we might be inclined to dismiss this as just an eccentric response of a lonely old man to a world he doesn't understand very well. It's true that an incident from Mr. Nakata's time in elementary school stole his memory, but that misadventure, too, has been attributed, at least in a tenuously speculative way, to a variety of natural causes.

The farther we go into the novel, however, the more difficult it becomes to explain away mysteries as just idiosyncratic responses of the naive, the inexperienced, the stressed, or the thoroughly puzzled. Or as metaphors. In some places, these inexplicable events are easy to ignore because they are innocuous. More and more, however, a parallel universe of mysterious encounters and phenomena comes to occupy a central and consequential role, in some cases dealing with instances of life and death.

For a time the mysterious, the spiritual, the unexplained and seemingly inexplicable add to the interest of the novel. But this is premised on the assumption that understanding will eventually be in the offing. After about three hundred solid pages that hold the reader's interest and seem pretty coherent, we expect the stories of Kafka and Mr. Nakata to merge in an interpretable way, and we expect the unexplained and increasingly important and lengthy ventures into mysticism to be explained. Instead, however, the novel's characters repeatedly tell each other, as well as the reader, that some things can't be explained or understood using ordinary language. So why write a novel? Novels ARE words! Quite a disappointment.

Much of he last hundred or so pages of Kafka on the Shore leave the reader wondering why we have to venture so deeply into the realm of the spiritual, and how this part of the story is tied to the rest of the book. There are connections between the everyday world and the world of mysticism, but while they are obvious they are also undeveloped, and some mysteries are simply dropped. Maybe we all should spend more time attending to things spiritual in our daily lives, but this is difficult when we understand the spiritual world so poorly and when it's hard to grasp thematic links between the spiritual and the ordinary.

The last third of Murakami's novel, a gratuitous and undisciplined celebration of the mystical, is ultimately unsatisfying and never really brings closure. It may be trippy or New Age, but however one characterizes it, the reader is left confused, guessing as to their meaning, guessing as to what it was that Mr. Nakata was supposed to complete, guessing as to what Hochino had accomplished in his battle with the amorphous alien, guessing as to what Kafka's sojourn into the woods was all about, and guessing as to what had really happened to his father, as well as his mother and sister. Too many things are characterized as intuitively understood by the characters but inexplicable in everyday language, sort of a sloppy literary contrivance used to pad the book.

Murakami writes skillfully, but he doesn't seem to know how to tie together the disparate but related themes of Kafka on the shore. The ending, no doubt fraught with metaphors that I missed, leaves diffusely scattered bits and pieces, as well as irrelevant and unexplained events and ideas that a good editor would have gotten rid of. Kafka on the Shore has a strong beginning and hums along pretty well for roughly three hundred pages, but then it fizzles out, as the author seems to lose his way.

This was my first Murakami novel and perhaps my awe with his style and craftsmanship are reflected in the five stars I'm giving it. It's not that there's any question in my mind that this novel deserves five stars, but it seems regular Murakami readers regard this book as a weak effort and if that is so, then I have quite a treat ahead of me.

On the surface this is a retelling of Oedipus, with Kafka playing the role of the son destined to unwittingly kill his father and marry his mother fulfilling the curse of prophecy. More deeply the book is an homage to Franz Kafka, playing masterfully with surrealist dreams and decaying realities. This is the story of the odd chapters, of Kafka the runaway, a fifteen year old in body but a wise older man within. On the even chapters Murakami tells the magic-realism story of Mr. Nakata, an older man who'd been in a strange accident when he was fifteen that left him without the intellectual ability to read or write. It left him as a simpleton with the unique ability to communicate with cats. Nakata, man in body - boy in mind, is Kafka's polar opposite, and their lives and destiny must intertwine throughout the tale.

Murakami analyzing the pointlessness of political positions on the liberal and conservative side of the aisle, first through a rebuttal of the feminist priorities toward a small private library where Kafka has found home and employment, and later through the voices of two Japanese soldiers who had deserted rather than fight in a war where they'd have to kill men they felt no animosity toward. The author shows the futility of forcing people to do what they don't want to do, all in the context of a story about a boy fulfilling a prophecy that he abhors.

Of particular note in the novel was his use of music as a metaphor for the actions and abilities of people. From the Beatles to Beethoven he deconstructs musical elements and parallels them to Kafka's moral failings and coming of age redemption. Just the sheer beauty of his musical descriptions was enough to awe me with the prose as poetic as any author I can recall reading.

It may not be Murakami's best, but it's worthy of five stars as it stands.

- CV Rick

I am a big fan of Murakami Haruki and I've read all of his novels. But Kafka on the shore is definitely the one I would most strongly recommend. Contrary to other people who said this book is no more than a hodgepodge of elements that the author had employed in his other novels, in my experience this one is mostly different from any of his other works. I'm not saying the superficial difference such as the double-plots structure and Murakami's adoptions of a 15-year old teenager as one of the two protagonists.(in other novels it's mostly a middle-aged man) Rather, I'm mentioning the theme: fate, which has never been so thoroughly explored in any of Murakami's other novels.
There are two protagonists: the aforementioned young boy who ran away from his home in order to escape a Oedipus-like fate, and a mentally challenged old man who has the capacity of talking to cats and conjuring 'fish rain' from the sky. Both of them are dealing with their own fate independently and engaged in their own adventures, which, finally, converged together in an ineluctable way. The boy is more aware of his own situations and keeps contemplating on the events that his fate had rendered upon him; whereas the old man is performing in a more passive way and do not dig into the events in a self-conscious manner. Murakami does not give a specific moral about these two characters, but I think these two figures constitute a fantastic contrast and leave due space for the readers to ponder by themselves.
For me the part attracts me most in reading Murakami (this book especially) is that, he allows readers to deeply submerge themselves in the protagonists' world, but simultaneously readers are always maintained a distance from them. You are observing them, tracking them, commenting on them, while you never feel you become them, become the protagonists. I think this is an amazing feeling.
In short, I recommend this book a lot! I think even people who are not so into a typical Murakami's novel could still enjoy this book. It's a maverick masterpiece!

Murakami's novel follows the fate of two unconventional characters. The first is called Kafka Tamura. He undertakes to run away from home on his fifteenth birthday, travel to a remote place and spend some time living in a library. His project turns out to be successful and so he finds himself at the Komura Library in Takamatsu where he meets Oshima and the enigmatic Miss Saeki.

The other character is an older man called Nakata, a master cat-finder who is able to converse with cats although he can neither read nor write.

Both Kafka and Nakata find their way to Takamatsu although they never meet. During their wanderings they meet all kinds of characters, some of them have a surrealistic nature. Indeed quite a few scenes have a dream-like quality because they are not rational. It is as if the reader were reading a sort of stream-of-consciousness but its form is fully structured unlike similar passages found in James Joyce or Virginia Wolf. It is a tale of quest which is highly inventive with cats conversing with people, fish raining from the sky and soldiers rambling in a forest, un-aged since the second World War... The superb reading for Naxos Audiobooks is done by Sean Barrett and Oliver Le Sueur. A fantastic performance.

Kafka on the Shore is easily one of Haruki Murakami's most accessible, surreal, fun and enjoyable reads. When you put it down, I think you're left turning it over in two ways. The first being trying to figure out how the two stories that occur in the book are connected and what exactly happened. The plot is like a labyrinth in it's structure (incredible considering Murakami apparently had no idea where it was going when he wrote it) that's a thrill to unfold and a mindbender when you start piecing it together. The second thing you're left mulling over is the point of the book. I think that this is where Kafka on the Shore comes up a bit short. For me, it doesn't add up to much because while I think there are several points Murakami is trying to make, they end up getting lost underneath the dazzling storytelling. I do have other complaints - the novel is a bit flabby, and some of the dialogue is a bit corny (this could be the fault of the translator Philip Gabriel who for the most part turns in a brilliant translation). Despite these complaints, Kafka on the Shore will leave you floating on a cloud somewhere contemplating what you just read, unaware and oblivious to the world below. Recommended.

It was an excellent book. Interesting book because protagonist 15 year old boy runs away from home and ends ups befriending a librarian at a private library. Murakami has cats that can talk to certain character. And whole assorted cast of characters which are Murakami type people there is a lot of Greek and Roman mythology and who it applies to the run away' situation. Especially it applies to the Oedipus complex. I highly recommend this book.

This story appears to be about two people, Mr. Nakata and Kafka Tamura, but it's really about everyones search for the other half of their identity. There is a myth that in the beginning there were three types of people, male/male, female/female and male/female. They were cut apart, and we all spend our lives looking for our other half. Nakata and Kafka are followed on their search. There are also three minor characters who make the whole story possible, Hoshino (for Nakata) and Oshima and Miss Saeki (for Kafka).

It's interesting to note that Kafka is Czech for CROW, Shima can mean island or stripe and saeki means a marginal profit. A crow is usually a metaphor for change (neither good or evil), most of the action occurs on Shikoku which is the smallest of the "Home Islands" but the most mystical in japanese myths, Oshima is of a different stripe (read the book you'll get it), and Miss Saeki is actually a 'marginal' person. I wish I knew more or that the translator had notes to explain some others that I missed or don't know, they would make the book more enjoyable.

Interestingly enough this is simply the story of a boy going through a 'right of passage' and another being released from his mental prison. Kafka, is a fifteen year old boy, searching for a lost mother and sister, but in truth he is searching for himself.

Murakami is an amazingly well read man; this you will find out from the quotes of his characters and the knowledge of different cultures that they possess. He quotes such diverse people as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Beethoven, Hegal, Dickens and many others. They are always quoted in context and are never just thrown in the way people bandy about names to show how cool they are.

This story is a journey, and like all journeys start with the first step. The first step of your journey is to pick-up a copy and begin to read. It is definitely worth the trip.

All the time I was reading this, I would say "this book is too far out there, even for Haruki Murakami". My wife would respond with "then why are you reading it?" and the honest truth is that the characters were so interesting and compelling I couldn't stop reading, even though the surreal nature of the plot didn't entirely agree with me.

So I wont go into a comparison between this and other Murakami stories because other reviewers have done that already, but focus on the characters, whom I enjoyed tremendously.

Creating a character means crafting a personality, and applying motivations to that personality. Motives lead to actions, which lead to changes, which lead to more motives, which lead to m ore actions, ad nauseam. That's writing 101. In "Kafka on the Shore", however, the characters (in some cases) entirely lack any personal motives. Rather, they are a part of some self-fulfilling prophecy. They are tied strongly to a predetermined destiny, and their actions and growth as characters stem from their investigation of that destiny.

As things begin to come together, we see the characters grow into something beyond mere personalities, and into something larger. They become the actual events and the whole story eventually swirls together into something that makes sense.

That's my interpretation of it anyway -- like I said, it was surreal. I'll let the experts analyze this one.

Plot: the story moves fluidly between defined goals, and is therefore easy to read, although the surreal nature of the story makes it hard to follow what's really going on behind the scenes.

Characters: See above. They're great. A woman who is also a little girl who is tied to the fate of a boy who is also her dead lover, and another boy who is also a girl, a benevolent truck driver and a mentally challenged elderly man who can speak with cats. And of course they all end up being something more than that. Add Johnny Walker and Col. Sanders and you have an all star cast.

Pace: The pace moved quickly, and while I often felt I was missing part of the big picture, I never felt bogged down. In fact, it was very difficult to put this book down.

Awkward Moment: There is a very disturbing scene around the introduction of Johnny Walker that almost made me put the book down, because it made me think it was going to take an uncomfortably dark turn. The moment passes though, so if your like me, have some faith and get past it and you'll enjoy the book in the end.

Prize Moment: Raining Leeches.

Loose Thread: The beginning of the book seems to be more grounded in actual events, and these events (and their relation to what is going on with the rest of the characters) fade as the story progresses. The pieces fit, but you have to find them yourself. This could be a translation issue.

Previously I had read some pages of the "Dance Dance Dance" book of the same author and then decided to read this one.
The beginning is very exciting presenting a set of characters at least "exotic": a 15 years old boy who is tired of his life and running away from his school and his house, a weird story from the WWII time which brings the 65 years old man who talks with cats, this old man will be helped by a 20s (years old) truck driver, a 50 years old lady who is the director of a private library and manages an androgen 19 years old girl who is responsible of the day-to-day activities at the library.
The book presents a lot of japanese cultural traces: solitude, escapism, WWII related stories, a nature influenced culture, the close relationship with animals (cats, crows, etc) and a fantasy or dream-like recurrent scenes.
After the third quarter of the story, most of the characters and scenery were already presented and the story as a whole became quite predictable as it begins to converge. Even though, to be honest, the anxiety to reach the end of the story didn't vanish.

Author of acclaimed works The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood, Murakami is Japan's leading writer of fiction. He is an original, offbeat writer with a wild and uninhibited imagination. In his latest work, Kafka on the Shore, the 15-year-old Kafka Tamura runs away from home on a quest to find his long-lost mother and sister-and to be rid of his father's prophecy. As he flees, so too does the World War II veteran Nakata, an older, retarded man whose quiet life has been turned upside down by a murder. Nakata suffered an unstated injury during the War that left him unable to read or write but able to talk to cats. This double odyssey brings Kafka and Nakata metaphorically together, as they both struggle to understand their respective journeys and what life has in store for them.

Murakami has never been shy about blurring the line between reality and, for lack of a better word, the oddly unreal. And true to form, in Kafka the reader is treated to the following: fish raining from the sky, a pair of Imperial Army soldiers unaged and still in the forest, and even a brief appearance by the characters Colonel Sanders (as a pimp) and Johnnie Walker.

Murakami is that odd writer who manages to pull off postmodern, biting work that says something-and is at the same time fun to read. Both in Japan and abroad, he has been dismissed by some as lightweight-in part no doubt because of his popularity. However, mixing high- and low-brow, Murakami blends and spins wonderful and wild tales. There are references to fashion, jazz, popular music, Truffaut, Natsume Soseki, and many more. In Kafka, a prostitute quotes Hegel; Greek tragedy and Plato put in an appearance; and then, of course, there is the talking cat. It might feel Lite, but Murakami is deep.

Nakata and Kafka converge though never meet in rural Shikoku, both on a metaphysical quest for an "entrance stone" that Nakata must open and close. For the younger boy, this is a passage into adulthood; for the older man, a search for a soulmate.

For Murakami fans, this is a must; for those yet to experience Murakami's world, Kafka on the Shore is an excellent place to start.

I've finally finished Haruki Murakami's new novel Kafka On The Shore, and it was an entertaining read. I'm not sure where it ranks among his other books yet. I have to evaluate it in retrospect of what I remember about the other books I've read, some of which were four years ago or longer. It is another mysterious search for meaning and self-definition in the face of evil. There are several loose ends that don't quite get tied up in the end, but Murakami's novels often end up like this. You are often left to draw your own conclusions about the novel's meaning. As usual, there are several motifs and digressions about the individual's fate in society vs. free will, the existence of another world separate from everyday reality, fantastical elements intercede with everyday life. However, it is done in a way so that it seems completely normal and a necessary part of the story. I think the narration is a major departure in that it is from the point of view of the 15 year old Kafka Tamura and mentally challenged Nakata. Kafka must come to terms with his father's premonition that he will be with his sister and mother, and kill his father. Nakata, an old man who had a mysterious accident as a child that has made him a sort of autistic adult with the ability to talk to cats, goes on a journey to set the world right before dying. During the course of the novel we encounter Johnny Walker, as a cat murderer and physic representation of evil, Colonel Sanders, as a pimp and seer, fish and leeches fall from the sky, and there's another "pure love lost-story not unlike what we first saw in Norwegian Wood. This is his longest novel since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, and it really allows you to get to know the characters as they move toward their respective fates.

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".

This is a complicated story. Yet the flow of the writing is simple. At no moment while reading this book did I feel I was losing the plot and that was important for me if I wanted to truly realize the magnificance of the story.

Its hard to say what the story is about. For each reader it will have a different meaning. For me it was about redemption, responsibility and the natural order of things. Every character in the story, regardless of how big or small his part, had a reason for existing. The writer created Spinoza's view of life in a metaphysical setting that will most certainly awe readers.

This novel will one day gain the same status as Franz Kafka's metamorphosis.

reading this novel is like watching a baseball slugger strike out.
'kafka on the shore' is about striving toward the authentic core of things, as opposed to remaining in the superficial habits of our modern societies. but at the same time, the novel's ultimate aim is to win over the reader by making him/her feel better or 'improved.' and what's more basic to our consumer society, than such stroking of the ego? it's just another way of making you feel nice and comfy. materialism for the happy few, perhaps, but materialism nonetheless.
it also seemed to me that 'kafka on the shore' has political undertones that might pass unnoticed. i found that it possesses much of the basic iconography of right wing ideologies: the quest for some powerful original experience, the entrance into a magic realm, the mesmerizing effect of culture, the ideal of self-discipline and order, an admiration for youthful strength and even rowdiness, an evocation of myth and legend, a meaning that's to be profound but whose very essence is that it cannot be grasped, so that the individual simply loses himself in it...
right-wing culture isn't 'cool' anymore, and it needs to be presented in a certain deflected light in order to fit into the main discourse of our day. but it's traceable if you know its scent, and 'kafka on the shore' leaves a pretty clear trail, in my opinion.

Kafka and Nakata
Oshima and Hoshino
Miss Saeki and Sakura
all the characters ( Includes Cats too) are such an intriguing mix of fiction and reality weaved into one. I cried for Nakata's naive views for his his own personality. I laughed for Kafka's over-reactive views over his own personality. I applauded Miss Saeki's opinions of her life and the beautiful single she recorded as the girl. Truly, Kafka on the shore is one book, which although bores you on some aspect, but still forces you to keep reading until you finish.

To name a novel after an author you are compared to is only the beginning of Murakami's many tricks. Kafka, the author, is credited for creating sub-narratives, ones which exist only in the reader's mind. Murakami is proudly in dept to Kafka, and goes so far as to name a book after him, knowing it will raise a hair or two on all his readers.

Similar to Hard Boiled and Wonderland, the novel is split into alternating chapters. One is of a runaway named Kafka, the other is of a semi-retarded older man named Nakata. Their respective stories read autonomously at first, but in classic Murakami vein, subtle correlations between the stories start poking around, and one soon becomes suspicious that perhaps the stories run parallel in some dimension. Brilliant handling on reader's tendencies to remember and/or forget things. It's as if Murakami is relying on reader's forgetfulness to play with recollection and dreams. The novel reads at many parts like a dream, in which time and space are absorbed into a small point, only to expand again when pertinent.

There are traditional plot strategies: a murder, a mystery, and a chase. However, these act as only anchors in the narrative. What Murakami is more interested in is identity, both symbolically (who we are as people) and formally (character aspects in a novel). Murakami plays with classic themes: unrequited love, oedipal complex, abandonment, adolescent loneliness, implications of war, and spiritual pilgrimages.

What makes this novel very special is that the `mystery' is never solved. Readers are never granted the satisfaction of finding out what really happened. All the characters remain the same; only in the reader's head do the characters bleed into one another. On the written page, there is no proof that anything uncommon actually happened, and when they do, it is attributed as a dream (certain characters sleep for two day stretches during the same time that crazy things happen). Yet, by the end of the novel, we aren't so sure about what exactly happened. Was Miss Saeki Kafka's mother? Did they sleep together? Is Kafka the boy on the shore who died long ago? Is Nakata really Kafka after is entered the `entrance' in the forest? Was one story simply the dream of the respective story's character?

The answers are not important. The `memories' that the reader carries away-memories from the `real' novel, memories from the memories in the novel, memories of reading the novel, and the myriad of blurry tiers that divide such things-are what are most important to Murakami, and us.

What can I say, I love Murakami, all of his stories, novels, early and late. Some more than others (Norwegian Wood was probably my least favorite, but even so I still enjoyed it). I'm one of those who, for whatever reason, feels a deep connection with his work, when I am nearing the end of one of his larger works (like this one) I begin to feel a sadness at the impending loss of a world where I feel at home, as surreal as it may sometimes be.
If you haven't read any of his work this is one of the books he is most noted for. However, as an introduction I would recommend starting with one of his earlier works, Sputnik Sweetheart, Wild Sheep Chase or if your feeling ambitious Wind up Bird Chronicle.

Reading, "Kafka on the Shore" was a mystical experience for me. I felt like I was dreaming about being in a room with an open window and occasionally an ocean wave splashed water on the concrete floor and the breeze carried the smell of brine up into my nostrils.

Did it all make sense? No. Were there parts of the book that weren't as fully realized as they could be? Yes. Was it the most deeply affecting novel I'd ever read? Yes.

Haruki Murakami's work is about things and people existing on multiple planes. In "Kafka," Colonial Sanders is a pimp. A son makes love to his fifteen year and fifty year old mother. A simpleton can talk to cats but can't understand much of what people say. By accepting these things, I opened myself up to the illogic of my own subconscious and Kaftka became a waking dream where I felt intensely alive and deeply connected to the world. There has been some critical discussion about how Murakami's technique is based on the Shinto religion. If that's true, then Murikami's genius is in making me feel the essence of this religion without my having any understanding of the culture or philosopy from which it sprang.

I see "Kafka" as a portal into a world of a new kind of consciousness. I see this in universal terms rather than as a merely a creation of Murakami's. I feel that while Kafka springs from his imagination it speaks to my creative core, one I share with the rest of humanity.

Murakami is great at crafting this puzzling little spiritual world. His light touch works marvelously. The various planes of reality here brush up against each other so delicately instead of just trampling through each other. Best of all, he's able to use this whole spirit aspect to enhance the human characters, to show the small tragedies and sense of incompleteness which animate so much of what they do, instead of just having them trumped by it. Personally, I think I prefer Murakami's kooky urban spirits ala After Dark to the more woodsy incarnations here. But if you've ever walked through a forest somewhere and been entranced by the sound of the wind whipping through the leaves, well, this book evokes that same feeling.

I was given this paperback for Christmas and I was intrigued because I'd never read one of Murakami's works before.

I enjoyed the beginning - an incident during WW2 when a group of children are subject to an attack of some sort. Despite never being told exactly what happened one is led to presume it was either extra terrestrial or mass hysteria.
Almost from the beginning the author throws in plenty of quotes Sartre, Mann, Kakfa, Camus, Hesse, Beckett, etc and he tries to emulate these philosophers citing some of the same issues in a rather superficial way.For example Jungian concepts, the subconscious, Freudian, fate, free will, the nature of morality etc.
I liked the plot - it is interesting and clever enough to keep the reader involved and yes, at first it was a real page-turner. Murakami is an entertaining writer and in this book his writing is fairly plain and simple (although he does go off on a tangent at times). But I was soon feeling that it was all a bit pretentious and I was beginning to be disappointed.

I enjoyed the two narratives, Kafka, and especially the old man's magical elements - these begin as unrelated stories and then slowly converge. But, unfortunately, the stories became so mixed up and I thought it didn't quite gel. Murakami left me 'dangling' as it were. He includes the Oedipus curse, but was it all a dream or real? There is a brutal killing and we are again left in suspense - we never learn who killed Tamura in the conventional world. Again, Kafka "seems" to sleep with his sister and a woman who may or may not be a lover or his mother.The reader never finds out as the novel's ending drops these threads without attempting to either demonstrate how Kafka outwitted 'fate' or that his father cursed him as part of some monumental plan.

Bemused?...I was.

How were the children immobilized during the war? We're never told what it in fact was. The story here just fizzles out. Parts are completely illogical because we do not discover the full facts. Would I try another book by the writer? Hm. Not sure. Probably not.

All in all, Murakami doesn't disappoint with this latest novel. He has a knack for handling the surreal and making it seem plausible, and using that to explore those feelings and moods in life that are incredibly hard to put into words. The plot carried me along, and it was hard to put the book down a few times when I had other things to attend to. The character Nakata could have really been botched as a monotonous, boring, or else sentimental character if handled by a lesser writer, but Murakami gets it just right. Kafka Tamura did seem a bit too mature for a 15 year old, however. I kept picturing him as in his early 20's despite myself. But overall the characters are convincing enough and rather memorable.

There were a few rough spots, though, where the characters made Murakami's literary devices a bit too explicit, as if he doesn't quite have enough faith in his readers to get the point. Similarly, even though several of the characters are avid readers, some of the dialogue gets a bit stilted in spots--just a shade away from being pretentious. These are of course minor flaws in an otherwise excellent work. Murakami is perhaps starting to get self-conscious about being "taken seriously" as a novelist? If so he shouldn't--he continually writes some of the most profound, freshest stuff out there.

Warning: spoiler, skip this review if you haven't yet read the book.

First, some general impressions:

Nakata, Hoshino, cats, stone, Colonel Sanders: fantastic, genius, at times laugh at loud funny, very fresh.

Miss Saeki, Kafka on the Shore painting: yawn

Johnny Walker: whatever, this is the empty point used to move the plot

Kafka Kamura - in the cabin, in the forest, on the move, with Sakura: compelling

Kafka Kamura - when absorbed into the Kafka on the Shore theme: sigh, yawn

I liked how much all the themes interlace. This seems to be one of Murakami's most tightly constructed novels. Kafka Kamura and Nakata (Kafka goes to a library just as Nakata longs to become "normal" (be able to read again), Nakata kills JW as avatar for Kafka). Kafka Kamura and Miss Saeki (as her lost lover, as his lost mother). Nakata and Miss Saeki (no past vs. no present). The idea of a "dream circuit", mentioned in passing, is realized in terms of the interconnections between these characters, the action at a distance (what I call avatars) is referred to the examples of living spirits (Tale of Genji cited, etc.). Sure some things are never explained, but they're the sorts of things better left unexplained (any explanation would've been a letdown) - sculptor dad / oedipal prophecy / Johnny Walker / labyrinth / intestines / soul flute, etc... that whole line is best left unexplained, no? Likewise, exactly why all those kids got hypnotized: isn't it better having that remain a mystery? I think so.

I found the book sort of bogged down for me at around the halfway point, just as the Kafka on the Shore painting plotline begins to unfold. The scenes in which Kafka's living in the library, getting absorbed into the role of avatar for Miss Saeki's dead lover, were the dullest for me. Fortunately the action keeps alternating with the Nakata/Chohino storyline, so it never got too static. And then, past that speed bump, so to speak, things pick up again.

The author makes magical realism seem logical. There is the interrogator Crow, (an inner voice), and the narrator, a fifteen year old boy, Kafka Tamura. In Japan during the war people scrounged for food. Everyone was hungry. A man wants to talk about a cat so names him. The cat protests that cats can get along without names. The man naming the cat went into a coma for two weeks when, as a school boy, he was foraging for food in the countryside. Now the government pays the man, Nakata, a subsidy.

The fifteen year old, Kafka, has run away from Tokyo and is spending his days at a private library open to the public. The library specializes in poetry. While at the library he reads Burton's ARABIAN NIGHTS. He learns that his stay at the hotel at a reduced rate has been extended through the efforts of the YMCA. Later he is permitted to stay at the library.

Miss Saeki from the library once wrote a song called 'Kafka on the Shore'. When her boyfriend died in the student revolt she vanished. When Kafka's father is murderd he learns irony. Man doesn't choose fate, fate chooses man. Colonel Sanders and Johnny Walker are people, or at least spirits, in the story. The author's technique is one of sampling. The Oedipus tale underpins much of the action.

Mr. Nakata attracts a follower. A young man, a truck driver, who wears aloha shirts, decides to assist him in his journey. Since Nakata and Kafka started in the same place and ended up in the same place, the police think they are connected. (It is a police matter because there have been two unexplained deaths.) Of course there isn't a connection, seemingly. Nakata's companion believes the police are worse than the yakuza.

Readers will find all of this both confusing and delightful.

Any book that can hold you on the edge of delighted and confused from the first page to the last is a real treat. An author who tackles a surrealist plot takes on the challenge of maintaining a convincing atmosphere of being at the border between reality and imagination without ever slipping too far in either direction. Murakami met the challenge in spades in Kafka on the Shore.

From the very first page of the book you sense having one foot in a world you can't wholly understand and another in the world you do understand. Murakami maintains the feeling for the length of the book to marvelous effect. You end up taking a journey with the young Japanese protagonist (Kafka) that is both entertaining and thought-provoking.

As you read the book, you'll notice influences that range from the X-Files to Don Quixote and you'll never want to put it down. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys slightly surreal or existential fiction.

Lovely book, but the translation is in stilted British English, not like the Japanese original (which is in hip, modern Japanese). Why would we say "torch" for "flashlight." ""carriage," for train-car, etc.? Is this meant to make the writing sound more sophisticated? I see that the translator is a native American, so I can only assume that he uses these weird translations for some special effect. Is this supposed to be the Masterpiece Theatre version of Murakami? The language gives this book an old-fashioned flavor, as though it had been written in the thirties or forties, maybe by Somerset Maugham or E. M. Forster, totally inconsistent with the content.

This is a story about the Oedipus conflict, taken to the extreme.

It is the story about once-smart boy, who, after an inexplicable incident, loses his memory and intelligence and gains the ability to cat whisper. Some are more difficult to converse with than others, (p 76) "You have to anticipate a few problems when cats and humans try to speak to each other." The boy becomes a man. His shadow is only half as dark as it should be. He goes on a journey.

It's the story of a runaway.

It is the story of Colonel Sanders; excessive sleep; graphic sex; Johnnie Walker; love; leeches; murder; mayhem; a stone, an appendageless, long, thin, pale parasite as "thick as a man's arm;" soldiers, etc., etc.

It is the story of a lot of weird, wild, wacky things, twists, turns and surprises. And if, by reading through to the end, the reader were to be able to figure out how all of the characters and concepts were connected, it might be worth the read. Some things become clear. Most remains oddly cloudy. Having enjoyed (but not entirely understood) two other books by Murakami: The Upside-Down Bird Chronicle, and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, I thought I was up for the challenge. But this book takes the cake as the strangest book I've ever read. Skip it, and choose instead, either of the two aforementioned, both by Murakami. Also good: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

Franz Kafka wrote of freeing the "tremendous world" inside his head and the fear that it would tear him to pieces if he tried to bury it within himself. For young Kafka Tamura, the protagonist in Haruki Murakami's magnificent new novel, KAFKA ON THE SHORE, the tremendous inner world is not literary but must be freed and explored all the same. In fact, for Kafka Tamura, coming to terms with this world is a matter of life and death.

Fifteen-year-old Kafka runs away from home, not sure of his destination, only certain that he must get away from his father. In the back of his mind is the idea that he may find his long lost mother and sister, even if it means fulfilling the strange prophecy his father cursed him with --- that Kafka would kill his father and then sleep with his mother and sister. Kafka leaves Tokyo with the voice of the "boy called Crow" in his head telling him that he must now be the strongest 15-year-old in the world. When he finally arrives in Takamatsu, he not only finds a strange and peaceful library to spend his time in but also awakens outdoors one night covered in blood with no memory of what has transpired. He soon learns that his father, back in Tokyo, has been brutally murdered, and soon he takes refuge in the library and with the kind librarians.

As Kafka begins his journey, so does Nakata, an elderly man who, after a violent incident when he was a schoolboy, has lost many memories and the ability to read and write --- but he does have the ability to talk to cats. Nakata flees Tokyo after he kills a bizarre madman named Johnnie Walker, who has been murdering cats in order to create an otherworldly flute. Nakata eventually is joined in his travels by Hoshino, a young truck driver who at once guides Nakata and is guided by him.

If this all sounds strange and complicated, it is. But Murakami's story is also profound and beautiful --- full of philosophy, metaphors, symbols and amazing characters. In a wholly unique style, perhaps best described as Japanese magical realism, Murakami's tale is both hopeful and heartbreaking --- a story of grief, loss and memory.

Soon the police are looking for Kafka to answer questions about his father's death, and Oshima, the wise and mysterious librarian, lets Kafka stay and work in the library. There, Kafka falls in love with the sad and grief-stricken Miss Saeki, a woman old enough to be his mother. He learns of her heartbreak and the song she wrote called "Kafka on the Shore," which translates to Kafka Tamura. What is the connection between Miss Saeki and Kafka? If she is his mother, and lover, has his father's dark prophecy come true?

Eventually Kafka must leave the library, and he stays for a while in a cabin in a deep and haunted forest where he finally must confront his loss and the hatred he felt for his father. At the same time, Nakata must close a mystical entrance he has opened to restore the world to the way it is supposed to be.

Throughout their journeys (if indeed the journeys are separate and not in fact the same journey), both Nakata and Kafka are helped by various characters, and each must confront painful and confusing realities in order to complete the nameless mission they seem compelled to undertake.

Without the dark paranoia of Franz Kafka's work, Murakami's novel does share some characteristics with it, such as a horrible father/son relationship, a feeling of a secret and closed other world, and a life full of riddles. KAFKA ON THE SHORE also refers to Hegel and other philosophers, the life and work of Beethoven, the story of Oedipus, and Japanese spirituality.

KAFKA ON THE SHORE is brilliant storytelling, such an original and well-written novel. It is fun and interesting to read, but thoughtful and challenging as well.

Franz Kafka wrote that a book "must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us," and Kafka Tamura must destroy the frozen sea of memory and loss in order to, quite literally, live the rest of his life. Murakami's novel is successful in so many ways (despite some slowness toward the middle section of the book) and surely must be the type of story Kafka had in mind when he imagined books as axes, destroying the cold parts of our hearts and souls to allow in warmth.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

One of the conversations in Kafka on the Shore goes this way:

"It's not something you can get across in words. The real response is something words can't express."

"There you go," Sada replies. "Exactly. If you can't get it across in words then it's better not to try."

"Even to yourself?" I ask.

Yeah, even to yourself," Sada says. "Better not to try to explain it, even to yourself."

That's the way I feel about this book. I really can't get it across in words, and I really can't say exactly what it means, even to myself. The meaning is like the truths revealed in dreams, which seem graspable for a moment but then slip away like sand from between the fingers. To report the plot is akin to saying that Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis is about a man who turns into a giant bug. But here goes, anyway, in the interest of information to those who have never read this wonderful novel.

The chapters alternate between two stories: that of a runaway teenage boy who is escaping a (perhaps) abusive father and the Oedipal prophecy that he will murder the father and sleep with his mother; and that of an old man who is simple and cannot read or write due to a mysterious wartime occurrence. Their paths converge, as both are propelled toward a seaside city by mysterious forces. I forgot to mention, the boy awakes one morning covered in blood and later discovers that his father was murdered hundreds of miles away on the same night. I also forgot to mention that the old man can converse with cats and cause fish and leeches to rain down from the sky.

All of this sounds like something that China Mieville or Neil Gaiman would dream up, but their books are to be taken literally, just set in alternative times and places. Murakami obviously intends for his story to be taken metaphorically, and his time and place is present-day Japan. Mieville and Gaiman both provide amusement with their imaginative creations. Murakami provides enchantment, and a dream-like state where profound truths are almost graspable.

I read that the Japanese publishers of this novel invited readers to submit questions to the author in an on-line forum and received a reply of 8,000 questions. That makes me feel better, as I am evidently not the only one left puzzling about the meaning of the book and not the only one passionate enough about it to want to understand more. I cannot recommend this novel highly enough.

This creative novel from the always facinating Haruki Murakami is more satisfying and focused than The Wind Up Bird Chronicle because it doesn't keep going off on tangents detailing the past of sevral quirky characters.This novel focuses on the experiences of 2 different characters:A 15 year old runaway who finds a new home in an old library and establishes a connection with the mysterious woman who runs it/A slow witted but charismatic old man who can communicate with cats who finds himself on a mysterious quest to find a stone that may open the door to a different world.There are plenty of fantasy elements but it's blended in so well with reality they don't overwhelm the characters.Murakami nicely sidesteps the rules of conventional storytelling,you don't just go from Point A to Point B and this creates an unpredictable reading experience.For such a creative story though it has the sweet nostalgic feel of a coming of age story at times,terrific sly humor and even a suspenseful climax every bit as creepy as a Stephen King book.A great one of a kind book that is the literary dream equivalent of a David Lynch movie.

I won't bore you with the details that dozens of other reviews mention. Instead, if you are a fan of Murakami, read this book several times. Each time is a little different and you pick up on metaphors, symbols, and events that you might have missed the first or second time through. Even Murakami himself says to read multiple times (on his website). Highly recommended as an intelligent, modern twist on Oedipus Rex.

I know a lot of people complain that there are thematic elements here that appear in many other Murakami works, and I wholeheartedly agree. But I am praising this as a stand alone novel and a great introduction to Murakami. This is not as subtle and complex as his other works, but reading this before diving into others is recommended.

Todays word is brought to us by the only Japanees author I've ever read, Haruki Murakami: DRAMATURGY.

page 287 Kafka on the Shore:

"The stone itself is meaningless. The situation calls for something, and at this point in time it just happens to be this stone. Anton Chekhov put it best when he said, 'If a pistol appears in a story, eventually it's got to be fired.' Do you know what that means?"

...

"What Chekhov was getting at is this: necessity is an independent concept. It has a different structure from logic, morals, or meaning. Its function lies entirely in the role it plays. What doesn't play a role shouldn't exist. What necessity requires does need to exist. That's what you call dramaturgy. Logic, morals, or meaning don't have anything to do with it. It's all a question of relationality. Chekhov understood draumaturgy very well."

People who are somewhat adaptable understand dramaturgy. They don't spend time asking,'why does the gun have to show up in my story' or being scared of said gun. They deal with the gun (or in Kafka on the Shore's case the stone), they accept without fighting it and move on.

The characters in Murikami's latest story flow with it's inertia: Kafka running away from home, drifting to wherever chance (or is it) takes him. Nakata, an aging simpleton, able to speak to cats, unexplicably drawn to a stone. The truckdriver Hoshino, shuttling Nataka from city to city, always lost as to the destination or why they travel at all. Others also seem caught in the flow of time, spiraling towards a final confrontation.

As in most of Murakami's books, that conflict is not resolved in the way you would think. This novel leaves more questions and uncertainty than any great novel should. However, if you've read any of Haruki's works then you are more than accustomed to this.

If you have never read anything by him I would equate his style to that of Johnathin Carrol, with Murakami being the clear better of the two. But, even that is not an apt comparison. I can honestly say that I have never read anything quite like Murakami. If you plan on starting, I would try Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World or (the most popular in America) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Kafka on the Shore may be one of the best places to start reading Murakami's works, and is even a good work to include in a sample of modern Japanese literature. The story has an unusual set of elements to it, including fantasy, dreams, and spirituality, coupled to familiar literary devices, such as parallel and intersecting plot lines and journeys. They're used effectively most of the time, and the writing creates a decent tapestry.

Almost immediately you're sucked into the story, and if you let yourself trust the author's premise for a few pages, you'll be rewarded with a fantastic tale. At times he seems to throw in a twist to save a stale point, but that's forgivable. The ending (which I wont give away) was a bit of a let down, although I can't say I'm surprised. I think it would have been impossible to end with the strength the book builds up from time to time.

I found this to be a fast read, having read it over two nights of my vacation. Again, trust the author (and buy the setup), and you'll find yourself enjoying an engaging story.

"Kafka on the Shore" is my first dose of Haruki Murakami, and one that I took up on a whim. After reading some reviews here, I also thought it was worth a shot. It was a shot I certainly in no way regret.

The first thing I would mention is the stunning array of unusual, but at the same time so real, characters. Kafka Tamura, the 15-year-old runaway, forms the main narrative, but there are major contributions from likes of Nakata, the mentally challenged elderly man who talks to cats. Perhaps the most interesting character is Oshima, but I will leave the reasons for the reader to discover. The characers were all touching some way, and all of them had real flaws, but also some real virtues. Despite their oddity, I found myself identifying with them and even sympathising with them.

Thrown into the mix is a heady concoction of truly bizarre events that all seem to link in together. Events spread over decades of time start to intertwine as the book progresses, as the pieces fall into place. The seemingly out of this world is merely commonplace in "Kafka on the Shore", which did a lot to rattle my own frame of reference.

In addition to the events and characters, Murakami has loaded his novel with various changes in person of the narrative. Kafka Tamura's elements are in the first person, while other characters are in the third person. Added to this, changes in the tense, and the occassional shift to second person, and you have a novel in which it is hard to get a fixed reference.

I came away from this book having thoroughly enjoyed it to the very last page, unlike some who found the second half lacking. I must admit that I am not entirely sure why I enjoyed it so much. I have the nagging feeling that there is a whole load of meaning that I have missed, but that may be a latent sense of paranoia on my own part.

I loved this book, and I am still mulling over what I have read in it. It is certainly a book that will keep the grey matter occuppied for some time after you have turned the last page.

Finished Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore today. Man, what a book. Blown away, I was. Now I begin to understand why this cat is considered one of the coolest, hippest literary novelists around, and one of the biggest sellers. Not just in his homeland, Japan, but everywhere around the world.

The first thing I did was look for his other novel, also considered one of his best,

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and it's on my shelf, mewling and miaowing in anticipation. (I tried all the Mumbai bookstores without luck, then happened to be at Inorbit Mall, Malad (W), after a trip to my C.A. to finalize accounts for last f.y., and there it was, perched on a bottom shelf, flicking its tail and squinting its eyes at me in that lazy, sun-dazed way that cats have at high noon. I picked it up and carried it to the counter, stroking it lovingly, ignoring the stares of the baffled salespersons.)

In case I haven't drowned you in the cat metaphors yet (an important part of Murakami's writing, just as white dogs are an integral obsession in the novels of Jonathon Carroll, another brilliant fabulist who boldly straddles the train-tracks that separate Literary Awardland from Genre Fantasyland) here's one more catty comment: This is a novel that leaves you feeling like a Siamese with a belly full of fish and fresh cream.

Murakami's prose, even in translation from the original Japanese, is perfect for the kind of story he tells. Simple, spare, yet unafraid to launch into flights of fantasy at a moment's notice. The story unfolds in parallel tracks. One, the main storyline, is about a 15-year old boy who leaves home, and his negligent self-obsessed father, and embarks on a long journey, presumably to find his long lost mother and elder sister, but also just to get away from his father, his life, himself. As anyone who has read enough fantasy-and this is a fantasy, whatever you choose to classify it as-knows that a new identity must begin with a new name. And the name our protagonist chooses for himself is Kafka. Not without significance, he keeps his father's surname, Tamura. Becoming Kafka Tamura.

The other parallel track is about an old feeble-minded man named Nakata who ekes out a living on his government sub city (subsidy but the mispronunciation is also not without significance, for Nakata will descend eventually into a sub city) and makes some extra yen on the side as a cat detective. Yes, you read that right. Cat detective. Because, you see, a long time ago, when he was very young, he suffered an incident which left him severely mentally impaired, and with a new mental faculty he hadn't possessed earlier: the ability to speak cat. He puts his ability to good use, seeking out lost domestic cats for a small fee and some of his favourite foods-"Nakata loves eel," he tells everyone he meets, several times over, usually until they feed him some eel. He's pretty good at it, too, and some of the most enchanting scenes in the book deal with him interviewing cats and the remarkable conversations he has with them.

The novel follows these two characters' points of view in a simple, alternate-chapter structure. Now, I'm not going to tell you the whole story. But you should know this:

If you've ever read and loved a Stephen King novel, you can't not go crazy with happiness reading this novel. Seriously. I don't give an ass' hoot whether the bigtime literary critics consider mentioning Stephen King and Murakami in the same breath to be some kind of literary blasphemy-they probably do. I can hear Harold Bloom turning over in his grave, and he isn't even dead! :~)

But without trying to elevate Stephen King to Nobel Prize stature, or to denigrate Murakami in any fashion, the resemblance is startlingly obvious. There's a recurring character-type in Stephen King's novels: the simple-minded country bumpkin or mentally challenged boy who speaks of himself in the third person and has some favourite catch-phrase he throws at everyone he meets ("Wolf! Wolf! Right here and now!" in The Talisman; "Moon! That spells Tom Cullen, it does." in The Stand and so on) and that's what Nakata resembles so eerily.

It's hard to think that Murakami might never have read Stephen King but I guess it's possible. But then how do you explain the other motifs that resemble King's work-the runaway boy backpacking it (a la The Stand) and the Bad Guy with long boots, black cloak and hat and sentient black dog and all (The Stand, and other books) and a hundred other small but significant similarities? Nah. I'd wager money on it.

Murakami loves his Stephen King. He's just lucky enough to be packaged and marketed as a literary master instead of a Japanese fantasy novelist.

Either way, the point is that this is a novel that's as easy to read and as enjoyable as a Stephen King novel. And it's a great novel.I know that Murakami is looked down on by a lot of Japanese readers and critics who consider him a "sell-out" who doesn't capture the real Japan or portray Japanese life and culture accurately. I respect that point of view. In India, we often have the same kind of bitching about our own authors. Last I checked, there was a movement to add a new section to the IPC (Indian Penal Code, another marvelous legacy we inherited from our British forebears-"Thank you, old chum, whatever would we do without all your antiquated laws?" "Oh, pshaw. Don't mention it."), the new section being specifically targeted at Indian authors who find success selling their novels overseas!

Anyway, so I understand that Murakami may not be seen in the same light as, say, Kenzuburo Oe or Soseki Natsume or Yukio Mishima, and I won't claim to have read enough Japanese literature to draw a final conclusion, but I'll say this, I know a great novel when I read one, and Kafka on the Shore is one of the best. Read it, and keep your Stephen King close at hand. And tell me if you don't see the similarities. But most of all, enjoy this novel, for that's what it' s meant for, not to be analyzed to death, or debated over by anal-retentive academics in dusty committee halls; simply read, reread, and enjoyed, down to the last delicious lick of the last savoury page.

Purrrr.

This is the first Murakami novel I have read. I liked his short stories I read in the New Yorker and initially and periodically I was disappointed with the novel, tried to put it down more than once, parts of it were boring, the prose was pedestrian, the work seemed more like a comic book than a novel, I got tired of long descriptive passages, I didn't like the lectures, I wondered about all the product placement, like ads, but I plowed on. I tossed it in the trash and then retrieved it, there was something drawing me to it, maybe the mystery of life. I finally finished it, didn't care for the ending, but couldn't imagine how to end something like this. I didn't want to like this novel, I generally don't like fantasy although I like good science fiction. And when I was finished with it I threw it in the trash again! It's like I was having a love affair with this book and was going through all the stages, romance, disillusion, desire, and reality, no one and nothing will ever live up to our expectations and this book didn't either, and yet, after I finished it I couldn't get it our of my mind. I felt like I was a character in the novel living the same kind of hallucinatory reality, not being able to make sense out of anything, dreaming in a waking state. If that is any indication of the success of this work than it succeeded infiltrating my consciousness and taking possession of me. I think I have found a potato chip author, I have to have another one and will probably have to read everything he's wrote. Not that I'll like it, I'll muse and grumble about him, his simple minded philosophy, his lack of genuine erudition, his poor writing style, grade school level. I will think of Jerzy Kosinski and Marquez, and Lewis Carrol all far superior writers, I will resent Murakami's immense success, but I will probably go on and read everything he's wrote and for the life of me I won't know why. I have been hypnotized--isn't that what life's all about?

I would argue this is among the most dream-like, sophisticated, magical books of Haruki Murakami. I first read it 10 years ago and I have read it again and again to understand the book better. I'd never recommend this to a person who is new to HM, but maybe after he/she has read Norwegian Wood. This book can be so overwhelming (in the best possible way) that would be off-putting. Nevertheless, this is my among my favorites of his. You can't call yourself a true HM fan unless you've read this masterpiece.

Kafka... is a combination of extreme. It is bound to move its readers in the same extreme ways and finally leave them utterly conflicted.

Murakami's surreal world - unlike let's say Potter's - is supposed to make no sense even within itself and is not exclusive away from our world of the Muggles. The characters are deeply flawed and almost completely purposeless most of the time. The inanity of their existence is reflected in the long meandering passages in the book where nothing seems to happen. In the end, when one assesses the final climactic deeds of each major character (Nakata is the best example but the same is true for many others), the overwhelming "our world rational" reaction is likely to be "really? all this ado and hype and backstories and moving around and 60-years of empty brain since WW2 and cat sacrificies and animal talks etc etc for just this? Burning a paper?"

As in any surreal artistic sculpture or painting, rules of the life as we live it are broken at will, in the most cavalier fashion and with the wanton, explicit objective to cause shock and awe. Readers are supposed to be revolted at times and the author succeeds primarily because of the sacred human life norms he decides to violate. He keeps the contrast by slipping quickly to the humdrum of existence in prolonged fashion.

Murakami's is a master storyteller. For all their faults, the characters are highly unique, charming and engaging. There is no predictability anywhere. On the other side, there are no aha moments. The suspense that is built up stays built and the author strongly believes in providing no solutions to many of the puzzles or no explanations to so many intrigues wonderfully crafted throughout the book.

Like in many surreal artwork, the unexpected is likely to cause in most readers evocation of unknown feelings or sentiments in strange ways. How enjoyable this is is highly subjective.

All in all, Kafka... is an experience worth going through even with only three stars in the review. This reader is perhaps too this worldly ordinary to provide more in the rating for anything so bizarre and even incomplete.

I read this book for a book club at school. The beginning was very intriguing and even 100 pages in I was still unsure about what the book was really about. Even though I did not know what it was about, I was still curious and interested in the book. That is until it became very mature, which included and is not limited to some violence with cats and adult scenes. After that, my the sense of curiosity in the book was gone. It continued to have mature scenes that I do not feel where necessary. As a whole there were a lot of really interesting metaphors and the storyline was really cool. But the book was just ruined for me because of all of the mature scenes. If I had not been reading this for a bookclub, then I would not have finished it (and I always finish the book). This book has a few different stories that the reader follows, at first they are independent, but eventually they all cross each other and are intertwined in a really neat way. There are also some side stories that are connected too. That part of the book is really cool. The main parts that the book follows are a 15 year old runaway and an old man who can talk to cats. The metaphorical aspects of the story made it really interesting to read but was ultimately ruined by the mature scenes. I would not recommend this book unless you enjoy something like Fifty Shades of Grey, because that is what this book felt like to me (from what I have heard). It was a slow read, sometimes because it was boring and sometimes just because it was slow.

Intruiged, I purchased Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore the week it won the World Fantasy Award in 2005. It's been sitting there on my shelf for the last couple of years, awaiting my attention. And recently, it kept moving up in the rotation. In the end, I caved in and finally decided to give it a shot.

Why wait for so long? Well, perusing reviews and related material, I soon learned that a vasy chunk of the author's readership never understood the novel. Back in 2002, Haruki Murakami's Japanese publisher set up a website on which readers were invited to submit questions regarding the meaning of the book. More than 8000 questions were received. And according to Murakami, the secret to understanding the novel lies in reading it multiple times. "Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren't any solutions provided. Instead, several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It's hard to explain, but that's the kind of novel I set out to write," the author tried to explain. All in all, it didn't inspire a whole lot of confidence in me.

Still, my curiosity was piqued and I knew I'd read it, hopefully sooner than later. . .

Here's the blurb:

An unusual and mesmerising novel from the cult Japanese author.

Kafka on the Shore follows the fortunes of two remarkable characters. Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. Their parallel odysseys are enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerising dramas. Cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghostlike pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since WWII. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle.

Murakami's novel is at once a classic quest, but it is also a bold exploration of mythic and contemporary taboos, of patricide, of mother-love, of sister-love. Above all it is an entertainment of a very high order.

Haruki Murakami has an uncanny gift when it comes to set the mood. Kafka on the Shore grabs hold of you and sucks you into the narrative from the very beginning. As a magical realism work, this strange and whimsical of alternate universes and timelines is an enjoyable, yet uneven, ride. At times, the story is thoroughly brilliant and fills you with wonders. But the meandering and erratic plotlines sometimes become redundant and boring, and the pace is brought to a standstill.

The characterization was by far my favorite aspect of this book. Taking center stage, both Kafka Tamura and Satoru Nakata are the driving force behind the two linked storylines. Running away from a terrible oedipal prophecy, Kafka occasionally interacts with an alter ego known as Crow. Most men will recognize themselves in the boy and what he's going through and will relate to Kafka's quest. But although Kafka lies at the heart of the novel, it's his interaction with Oshima, Sakura, and Miss Saeki that makes his storyline so special. For his part, Nakata may be a lovable simpleton who can speak with cats. But his plotline doesn't truly take off until he teams up with Hoshino. Hence, though Kafka and Nakata are the principal focus of this work, it's the supporting cast which is responsible for most of the poignant and emotional moments found throughout its pages. There are a number of powerful sequences, chief among those a rape scene that many might find off-putting.

The rhythm is crooked from beginning to end. At times, the pace is fluid and Kafka on the Shore is a veritable page-turner. And yet, in some portion of the book the rhythm slows to a crawl and the plot goes absolutely nowhere, making me want to open my veins.

There is resolution of a sort at the end of the book, but one doesn't truly understand everything that took place. Which prevented me from fully enjoying the novel. Too bad, as this could have been a brilliant reading experience. It is good, mind you, but it could have been great.

A complex, fantastical novel with philosophical musings and literary tropes discussed throughout. Translated to English from Japanese, it is a novel that has the distinct feel of its country’s setting.

About: There are a a number of story lines in this complex and layered story, with the two primary ones based around Kafka Tamura and Mr. Nakata. The story starts with fifteen year old Kafka in the process of running away from his home in Tokyo, perhaps due to his emotionally unavailable father or to find his mother and adopted sister, who left when Kafka was little. As a usual sort of intelligent teen with some unusual attributes (he has an imaginary boy named crow who advises him on various issues), he takes his “road trip” to escape.

Then there is Mr. Nakata, a lovely “simple” older man who cannot read but can amazingly speak to cats (and boy are the cats amusing and well done). He has a “Zen” like characteristic to his attitude and also to his speaking quality in the audio version. Although the two men never actually meet, they move inside the story with their own personal quests overlapping frequently - with the intricate connections becoming clear as the story progresses.

Thoughts: Kafka on the Shore has a variety of themes which may intrigue potential readers, as they did me. Some of these are - cats; World War II; philosophical musings; discussions around literature; the use and discussion of literary tropes such as metaphor, allegory and more; and the arts, including music. Murakami addresses gender and feminism in an indirect way. He has also woven in Asian spiritual themes such enlightenment and rebirth, and some interesting imagery regarding body fluids. The strongest thread in the story is its connection with the mythical story of Oedipus, that creates an unusual twist within the book. For a bit about this myth, here is a short definition:

As a Freudian psychological metaphor describing son–father psychosexual competition for possession of mother, the Oedipus complex derives from the 5th-century BC Greek mythological character Oedipus, who unwittingly kills his father, Laius, and marries his mother… (via Wikipedia)

It’s interesting that several of Murakami’s major themes for Kafka on the Shore are metaphor and the myth of Oedipus, and that this shocking complex is also considered a metaphor in its definition above.

I felt that the readers’ voices for the characters where done very well, giving life to the various and well developed characters. I liked that so many of the themes stimulated an intellectual side for me and that better yet I learned a few things. However, I had a conflict – there were too many sexual references and scenes, some were too detailed. Indeed the end of the novel became more about our main protagonist Kafka’s sexual desires and experiences than anything else. Otherwise a very worthy read and well done in this audio version. I give this intriguing audio book 4 stars; more if the sex had been a bit more subtle.

I read ‘Kafka on the sea shore’ during my fifth grade’s summer. I was amazed by the two unbelievable stories in the book, and was deeply attracted by them. There was a reviewer had said that Haruki Murakami, the writer of ‘Kafka on the sea shore’, have the amazing ability to astonishing people in a beautiful way. I agree.
The book contains two main characters at the same world but different places. They had some how connections between them, also some kind of similarities, but they had never seen each other. Kafka is the word ‘crow’ in Czech. And it’s also the name of the younger character in the book. Kafka has no mother, and a weird father who is almost never done any responsibility that a dad should do.
The other character was Nakada, an old man who lost all memories and knowledge in a mysterious accident in his childhood. However, because of that, he got the ability of talking with cats. Both of these two people have tragic lives and were ignored by people around them in some way, but they stayed thoughtful and helpful. Even though Nakada doesn’t have much knowledge, he still has his own decision and opinion about things happen in his The part of looking for neighbor’s lost cat was my favorite in Nakada line. Other cats told him that not to be so curious about the lost cat, or he would get into trouble. Nakada was scared, however, he didn’t walk back in front of danger.
Kafka was also very brave as well. He was only fifteen and had already prepared for leaving home for several years. When he was outside on his own, he was not worried but making his living plan in a clam mood. In Murakami’s story, especially in ‘Kafka on the sea shore’, characters are candid and persistent (in a good way). When they face to unknown and dangerous situation, they would scare, regret, and feeling helpless, but you can see that they are always walking forward. It is very valuable and worth to be respect.
Murakami wanted to show how weak roles grow up and find their own meaning of life, and he completed the purpose successfully. Not only two main characters, people in the stories were all have some difficulties in their lives. These were actually exaggerated real examples in reality, because everyone has problems. Kafka, as a fifteen-year-old boy, represents each person in this world. We are all on our ways to find the truth of life. Whoever we are, too young or too weak, if we want, there’s always another fresh start waiting for us.
For this book, I think both children and mid-age people are suitable to reading it. Child might not able to understand it clearly, but because of Murakami’s fairy tale style, they can see the story in an interesting angle. Mid-age people have more patient and experience than teenagers; these can help them really walk into Kafka’s world.

The title alone, KAFKA ON THE SHORE, signals that what's inside is out of the ordinary, and it most certainly is. Haruki Murakami has filled this 436-page novel with a mysterious object in the sky, talking cats and an alter-ego black crow, an old man who sleeps for forty hours at a stretch, a hemophiliac hermaphrodite librarian, "concepts" who appear in the form of Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders, ghosts, leeches raining from the sky, a giant slug that inhabits human bodies, and a magical stone portal to an earthly Limbo deep in the forest. Toss in some Beethoven and Haydn, Adolph Eichmann, Napoleon's invasion of Russia, Oedipus Rex, the Trojan princess Cassandra, The Tale of Genji, the Arabian Nights, and American jazz and rock music, and the result is a cultural rollercoaster ride through a sort of secular, pop mysticism.

The story line alternates between two distinct threads. The odd-numbered chapters trace the coming of age escapades of Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old high school dropout and runaway. Kafka is preternaturally mature and unusually self-disciplined for a dropout, but his childhood has been marked by the sudden departure of his mother and sister and the upbringing of a cold and distant father. He encounters a series of sexual adventures on his sojourns, complicated by a bizarre connection to his father's stabbing death and his apparent completion of the Oedipal triangle by sleeping with an older woman who might be his mother.

The second story line involves Satoru Nakata, an aging man-child who collapsed as a youth into a sudden sleep along with fifteen of his classmates while they were in the forest on a mushroom-picking excursion. Unlike the other children who woke up shortly after, Nakata remained in a coma for several weeks. When he finally awoke, he could no longer read or write and had lost his memory. However, he had a newfound ability to speak with cats. We follow Nakata on a grail quest that even he cannot understand, aided by a truck driver named Hoshino whose life is changed by his experiences with the old man he calls "Gramps."

Ultimately, Nakata's and Kafka's stories merge in Shikoku, a small Japanese island, where Kafka has been simultaneously hiding from his father and from the police. Nakata unknowingly opens a door that enables Kafka to confront the truth about himself and his feelings toward his mother, a truth that allows the boy to proceed with life on his own terms, to sit at the metaphorical shore and contemplate both his past and his future.

Fans of Murakami will likely enjoy KAFKA ON THE SHORE for its offbeat brazenness and its kinky ride through modern culture, while those new to the author may find this book uncomfortably strange. Either way, Murakami's is a unique voice in modern literature, full of humor and intriguing speculations, offering a fascinating perspectives on the meaning of life and how we each find our own way to live it.

KAFKA ON THE SHORE is a literary three-ring circus, but as everyone knows, the circus is always fun. And it's also a magical place we sometimes dream of running away to join, a place where we, like Kafka Tamura, can escape the burdens of real life.

If it is the first time you read Murakami, do not begin your journey with this book. You really should go through his short stories, and then at least "Dance Dance Dance" before you try this one. It is not an easy reading, and unless you are used to Murakami's style, are familiar with some of his previous works and ideas, you will not enjoy the book as much as you potentially can.

On the other side, if you are already "hooked" by Norvegian forest and are able "to listen to the songs of the wind", then add this one to your bookshelf and enjoy.

(Sorry, I am slightly cheating here - I usually read Murakami's books in Russian translations, which are fabulous - I do not know whether Murakami was "lost in translation" into English.Hopefully, not - and it's worth the try, anyway.)

I've read a number of Murakami's work and I must say this is his best outing to date (over-shadowing the wonderful and expansive "Wind-up Bird Chronicle"). What amazes me most about his writing is the clarity with which Murakami brings some of the most bizarre and off-putting stories out there. "Kafka on the Shore" is the perfect example of a writer who continues to push and to improve his writing and the final product is some of the best fiction I have read in a long time.

This novel is filled both with the bizarre and the familiar. The novel alternates between the story of a young boy who runs away from home and an old gentleman who can't read but can talk to cats. The connection between the two seems constantly about to be revealed and it is this drive to find out what links te two of them that made me race through this book in less than two days (what else am I going to do on my break but read great fiction?).

The novel resonates with much of what Murakami has written in the past - weird connections and happenings that within the context of the story seem both strange and common even to the characters that experience these things. Leeches falling from the sky, ghosts, and gateways into different worlds are met with a shrug of the shoulder as if this is something to be expected. I want to go so far as saying this is a new form of magical realism, but it works differently from what we see in Marquez and some of the other popular South American writers. The things that happen in Murakami's novels are more central to the text and are in fact represenative of turning points in the novels rather than details that flesh out or make a character more interesting as I've seen it used in the past. It borders on fantasy, but fantasy grounded in today's reality with references to the Beatles and Led Zepplin as common as a guy who cuts off the heads of cats to construct a magical flute.

I love this book and I think Murakami is the best storyteller out there today (even better than McEwan, Zadie Smith, and Didion).

I spotted Murakami's books only recently, and was excited when it came onto our writing program's reading list. So I was pretty happy to be reading this book to begin with - which usually gets me all defensive about what I'm reading....

But man! This book is utter nonsense. Magic realism? Hogwash.

The writing has way too much exposition, and every character starts preaching philosophy on every second page. It's ridiculous. And the point of the whole story? Who knows? It's utter nonsense! The whole things is written to cater to American audiences (there's even a scene in which these so called Japanese people are going to dial 911)

Complete waste of 12 dollars, and I won't be reading any more of Murakami's work again.

Before KAFKA ON THE SHORE, I had only read some short pieces in VINTAGE MURAKAMI, which struck me as very Raymond Carveresque pieces with slight doses of absurdity and surrealism... interesting, but nothing earth-shaking.

KAFKA ON THE SHORE shattered, then far exceeded, my expectations. The story cuts between Kafka Tamura, a 15-year old boy running away from a strange and unhappy home, and an elderly, mentally disabled man Nakata who can speak to cats. Kafka strikes me as a rather typical existentialist narrator-- a distant and removed "Stranger" to his environs-- but the learned and eloquent characters he meets (like Oshima), as well as his inner explorations, provide for fascinating reading. Nakata's story is more dream-like, with extravagantly surreal episodes like fish raining from the sky, at first leaving the reader unclear as to whether we are in a world of magic or just have an unreliable narrator.

This fascinating work is the best I've read for some time, weaving fantastic elements of magic and dreams in while retaining the down-to-earth reality of the characters and straightforward prose that I have come to expect from Japanese authors. Think magic realism, but more, with more magic AND realism than its predecessors.

I can't recommend KAFKA ON THE SHORE highly enough.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. The language, the imagery, and particularly the relationships that developed as the stories progressed.

And the translation was a pleasure too. Just one mistranslation that I recall: complimentary breakfast, which should probably have been complementary breakfast. Otherwise, there were many uses of idiomatic English that made it seem written in English. Only the author's name and the Japanese names of the characters indicated otherwise. Unless you count what might be a Japanese sensibility regarding relationships, which tended to be gentle and evolving, rather than conflicting and stuck.

If you like to read books with a straight-forward cast of character archetypes, clearly-defined conflict, and a perfect resolution with all strings neatly tied up, then you may want to avoid this book.

If you are, in fact, sick of all of those popular fiction conventions, then DEFINITELY pick this book up. It is easy to read, and because it is so easy to read, before you know it you are sucked up into this crazy world that looks like our own, but with the shine and inherent darkness of Alice's looking glass. There were some pages I read and reread just because the atmosphere created was so enchantingly surreal, and, of course, there is mystery all through it to keep you turning the page, thus throwing you further down the rabbit hole. In a sense, this book is not unlike Alice in Wonderland in that your ability to predict what comes next can never be fully accurate when the story naturally includes talking cats.

Finally, this book's most richest attribute, in my opinion, is its ability to haunt me a week after I finished it. The author forces you to reach your own conclusions; he does not hand feed them to you, but there are sufficient clues scattered throughout it like crumbs so that when you close the book you begin reaching for them to complete the picture. I sometimes feel compelled to pick the book up and reread it because of that, but in the meantime I think I have a new favorite author. I just bought "The Wind up Bird Chronicle" because I want to go back to that place Murakami has created and live there for at least another 600 pages.

In "Kafka At The Shore" there is an interplay of many elements: metaphysical, spiritual, aesthetic, emotional. There are beautiful sexual fantasies, and clinical descriptions of Kafka's penis. Like a well constructed symphony, there is a great range of voices. The novel is nicely paced, and well plotted. Murakami is adept at imagery, and does not hesitate to bring the metaphorical and impossible into the "real" world.

At the same time, the novel does not have the emotional impact that it might, given its subject of a teenager trying to surmount the effects of a childhood without love. I also thought some parts could have been edited and tightened up such as the journey through the forest.

I guess you can say that I'm a bit of a Murakami fan girl. I devour everything Murakami (although I don't necessary like all) and Kafka is my favorite of all his works. I cannot say that his writing is particularly polished because his plots are often obscure and confusing. Nonetheless, I always find myself entranced by his work regardless of how seemingly ordinary and passive his main protagonists are. Kafka is Murakami at his finest. I would say it is a departure of sorts from the usual Murakami. The protagonist, Kafka Tamura, is far from the middle aged 30 something jazz type men that Murakami often writes about. The weird urgency of this novel comes from the preoccupation of internal struggles, one you can imagine as a drama acted out within a single psyche. In each self lies broken pieces that must be put back together. Lives that are held in suspended animation, stalled and must, by all means be relaunched into the painful but necessary process of change. Reconciling these stories in our minds is a necessity that has been done for humanity since the beginning of time. Dreams do a good job at simulating this experience for us. But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it is the rare artist, like Murakami, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves.

A young boy is seemingly released into an unknown existence resulting from an apparent dark history. Without guidance and progressing on intuition alone, Murakami takes the reader through a dramatic reality wrought with ethical faux pas and led by liberalism. The boy's ego, A boy named crow, is evocative of Alex in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. It is an apparitional character in Murakami's novel, which comprises several other outlandish characters, seemingly disconnected yet bewitchingly associated. Expect several philosophical investigations raised between Murakami's lines, including a humourous play of Wittgenstein's Tractatus in a significant dialogue between a librarian and a representative of a feminist group.

what a very complex concept, set in a complex environment but he's such a good writer that it really allows even the simplest of thinkers to identify well with the characters. There are consistent themes of love, lust, wonderment and a sense of belonging. Seriously, it's like it was written just for me. I struggle so deeply and much of kafka's troubles in dealing with the past almost help me see things differently in my life. even though the story twists around the idea of the oedipal complex, i feel like it was way beyond that into the intangible and into the sea of emotion and memories. dreaming for me has also been a lot more profound. the thoughts you are left with after reading this book are stuck with you for days moving into your sleep, just thinking and thinking about life and everything! my dreams are waking, but not as they used to be. I can't describe it really, but this story has touched me very deeply

this was my first time reading murakami and I couldn't put this book down from the moment I started reading it. not even the same idea, really. he's such a fantastic writer and thinker, I want to read everything he's ever written.

I am a prodigious reader of literary fiction, yet "Kafka on the Shore" is the first that I've read so far by Haruki Murakami. He is widely popular (particularly among the young) all over the world. He has won numerous literary awards including the Gunzo New Writer Award (1979), the Noma Literary Award (1982), the Junichiro Tanizaki Prize (1985), the Yomiuri Literary Award (1996), the Kuwabara Takeo Award (1999), the Franz Kafka Prize (2006), the World Fantasy Award (2006), and the Kiriyama Prize for fiction from the Pacific Rim (2007). His fan base is worldwide and legion--most are rooting for him to win the Nobel Prize sometime soon. So, I thought it was high time that I read one of his novels. I am glad that I did.

I found "Kafka on the Shore" intellectually intriguing and compulsively readable--overall, a stunning surreal Cirque-du-Soleil kind of literary experience. When I finished the book, I was intellectually stimulated and exhausted. I was also a tad bit let down by an ending that did not seem to measure up to the magnitude of the whole. But most of all, I was powerfully confused. I am the type of reader who loves to uncover thematic meaning within works of literary fiction, but this book had me stumped.

The book is a surreal coming-of-age tale. There is an eclectic mix of genres, including sci-fi, fantasy, psychological, detective, erotica, mystery, thriller, spirit quest, and romance--they're all here--and the scaffolding that holds the plot together is nothing less than a postmodern Oedipal myth! It's positively brilliant, deliciously bizarre, and enjoyably brazen.

The more I struggled with uncovering the thematic meanings hidden in the whole, the more it became obvious that enjoying the journey thorough the story is far more important than deciphering whatever themes and riddles may be there. Nonetheless, I persisted, trying desperately to piece together a set of coherent symbolic themes. Yet every time I thought I was onto something, the interlocking concepts fell apart in the details. It was a pleasurable mental exercise, nonetheless.

Personally, I found the book intellectually profound mostly because of the small bits and pieces of stimulating intellectual dialogue and description that pop up routinely throughout the book--discussions of philosophy, symbolism, metaphysical systems, modern culture, musicology, etc. These make the reading complex and fascinating, and contribute to making the surreal appear real.

As an academic research librarian, I was challenged to try to find what interpretive spin others had placed on this novel. So I did my research as thoroughly as I could, given the time and resources I had at my disposal. There are countless reviews, on blogs, in academic reference sources, and in newspapers worldwide. There are also numerous interviews with the author about this work and others. I have digital access to all these resources and have spent many more hours than I would like to admit combing through them trying to find whatever there was that might shed light on what the author meant to convey with this work.

In the end, I actually found precious little in terms of a cohesive thematic unraveling of the meaning behind the text! What I did find that seemed significant, were various interviews with the author where he shares with us how he writes, what themes he is trying to convey when he writes, and what he was trying to do with this book in particular. Here are some of the most relevant quotations I found from these interviews.

1) SOURCE. "Author's Q and A" for "Kafka on the Shore" posted on the Murakami's Random House Website.

QUOTE. Murakami writes: "'Kafka on the Shore' contains several riddles, but there aren't any solutions provided. Instead, several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It's hard to explain, but that's the kind of novel I set out to write."

2) SOURCE. Interview with Murakami in the "Irish Times" (May 17, 2003, p. 60).

QUOTE: The interviewer writes: "Murakami writes as if in a dream. Not a sleeping dream--he is no richer in night dreams than anyone else, he says--but a waking dream, one he can control. And he demonstrates--hands outstretched, fingers moving on an imaginary keyboard, eyes drooped. 'And dreaming like this, this is fiction,' he says. 'It is exciting. I don't do any planning when I start to write. I just begin and follow my dream.'"

Further on, Murakami says: "Young people today are so helpless. The world they are in is so controlled it's not easy for them to find a way out. They are very thirsty and they absorb anything, naturally and eagerly. And stories, if they are good, they offer a way out. Not in reality perhaps, but in their heads, and that's a help. In that inner-space world you can find a special place for yourself. My books offer a sense of freedom from the real world."

Later in the same interview, Murakami says: "I believe the purpose of writing a novel is to write in a very simple, neutral prose and to write a very complex, deep story...Some writers do the reverse. They are using very complex language to make up a very simple--I would even say shallow--story. And I don't think that's right."

3) SOURCE. Interview with Murakami in the "Paris Review" (Summer 2004, Issue 170, p. 115-151).

QUOTE. Murakami says: "We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same: we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it's a commitment; it's a true relationship. That's what I want to write about."

4) SOURCE. Interview with Murakami in the "The Times" (London, Jan 22, 2005, p. 36).

QUOTE. Murakami says: "In this age, you don't know who is a friend and who is a foe--terrorism is just one example...They could be anywhere, any time, in any form. It's a more postmodern world than the Cold War era, but that's the reality whether we like it or not. Honestly speaking, this world is getting closer and closer to the world of my fiction-- more chaotic, more surrealistic and risky."

Further on, the interviewer comments: "As the Sixties became the Seventies, the student avant-gardists were transformed into obedient salarymen. 'We said that we could change the world, but nothing has changed,' he (Murakami) has said. 'The world has changed us.'"

Later in the same interview, Murakami says: "I want to be optimistic, but as a writer I tend to be pessimistic. If you don't believe something, you're nothing as a person or a writer. I want to see the good side of society but I know that sometimes it doesn't turn out that way. I guess I write about bad things in my stories, I write worst-case scenarios. Fiction is just like a dream. You have nightmares--worst-case scenarios of your mind--and they release possibilities. I try to keep dark sides in my stories--it helps to keep the balance in actual life."

Further on, Murakami says: "When I was young I thought I could write anywhere, I wanted to be free. But as I got older I realized that I can't be free. No one can be free."

5) SOURCE. Interview with Murakami in "The New York Times" (New York, Oct 15, 2001, p. E1).

QUOTE. Murakami says: "What I write are stories in which the hero is looking for the right way in this world of chaos. That is my theme. At the same time I think there is another world that is underground. You can access this inner world in your mind. Most protagonists in my books live in both worlds--this realistic world and the underground world. If you are trained you can find the passage and come and go between the two worlds. It is easy to find an entrance into this closed circuit, but it is not easy to find an exit."

Later Murakami says: "In Japan most people think that terrorism is the United States' own problem. The U.S. is the strongest country in the world and Islamic people don't like America, therefore there is a terrorism problem. But that isn't right. The same thing can happen at any moment, in Tokyo, Berlin or Paris, because this is war between closed and open circuits, different states of minds. This is not about nations or countries, and not about religion, but about states of mind."

6) SOURCE. Interview with Murakami in the European "Wall Street Journal" (Brussels, Dec 11, 2006, p. 12).

QUOTE. The interviewer writes: "The protagonist in 'Kafka on the Shore' is uneasily semiconscious of a murder he may have committed in the past. Themes of history and memory clearly run through Mr. Murakami's books. Yet he seems loath to analyze his own work for political messages or historical lessons, saying that he just wants to 'write a story.' Sending overt political messages is simply not the job of a fiction writer, he says. That's not to say that Mr. Murakami's colorful prose doesn't address serious issues. It just does so in an indirect way--which, in Mr. Murakami's view, may be even more effective. 'If you say, "I'm very sad, my dog died," it's a message--a statement. Nobody sympathizes with you,' he explains. 'In that case, you have to change your statement into another kind of story. When you're sad, when you lost your dog, you should not write about your dog. You should write about another thing. If you write about the dog, it's an essay, not fiction.'"

I hope these quotes prove helpful as you think about "Kafka on the Shore." They were helpful to me...in the end, they helped me to stop trying to find answers to the riddles. I just let the enjoyable experience of reading this novel knock around in my brain for a while, providing me with all kinds of personal intellectual introspection.

My recommendation: read the book, enjoy the journey, and if the journey awakens any special meaning for you...well, enjoy that, too.

To start off, I really loved The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Yet this book felt so terribly wrong to me.

Murakami employs fantasy realism (dream actions, talking to animals, etc.) in order to have his characters undergo simple dramatic changes. In Wind-Up, this technique was used subtly. In Kafka, he uses dialogue to very blatantly say, "Hey, this is inspired by the Tales of Genji. Just in case you couldn't tell," by the character of Oshima. I found this book frustrating because the character of Kafka is completely unrelatable; he is incredibly well-read, brilliant, very attractive and muscular, and charming. In Wind-Up, we see Toru painted as tortured and almost pathetic.

I'm not saying that he should write the same book twice. Rather, it felt as if Murakami wrote this book just to say "this is my schtick." Aside from Nakata's adventures, I found this book almost unbearably frustrating to read. As much as I loved Wind-Up, I hesitate to read Murakami's other works. Any suggestions?

I saw this on the bookshelves and bestseller lists and had been avoiding it for some time for a few reasons:

1. I'm generally not a fan of translations, especially from languages as different from English as Japanese
2. The whole surreal thing didn't seem that appealing
3. For some reason, the cover really annoyed me; It reminded me of the Frodo Baggins character in Sin City

Once I started reading, I was able to put all of that aside. I got into the storyline, felt for the characters and ended up caring about the outcome. The story is elegant, and although all the pieces don't quite fit together logically (at least to me), it ended up making enough sense.

My general advice is to read the first 30 or 40 pages before you decide the book is not for you.

Like some other reviewers here, I thought this book started off amazingly. The dark mood, the crow character, the two protagonists, the amazing Johnny Walker scene.... it looked like it could easily be Murakami's best. However, it just went downhill (albiet slighly) for the rest of the book.

The end of the book was both to predictable and too unexplained (what was Crow? what did the battle between crow and that corporate icon have to do with anything? How was it resolved? etc.)

Still a worthwhile read, to be sure, but it is not the best book my Murakami by any means. If you are new to Murakami I'd suggest these three above Kafka on the Shore:

The Elephant Vanishes (stories)

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (his best, but very long)

Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World

If you read those and like them, then try Kafka on the Shore.

'Kafka on the Shore' is a return to surrealism for the often brilliant Haruki Murakami. However unlike his masterpiece 'The Wind-up Bird Chronicle' this book seems to an overcooked, gratuitously bizarre mishmash of spirtualism, sexuality (and pedophilia), and violence. Although I suppose the disjointed story, which would be difficult to explain (..and so I won't bother :-)), comes together in the end I regret saying that 'Kafka on the Shore' was not one of Murakami's better efforts.

However the book isn't a total loss. There are interesting vignettes sprinkled throughout. And although I found the translation strewn with too many Americanisms I did enjoy the prose and characterizations. So while 'Kafka on the Shore' is a disappointment it is not a *bad* read.

Bottom line: Haruki Murakami has seemingly lost his way with this book. Best left for his hardcore fans only.

Initially, I had a problem with this book. Kafka On The Shore is a story of fate illustrated with metaphors. The story is told in both the narrative of fifteen year old Kafka; and through third person perspective featuring Nakata, an elderly mentally challenged man. Murakami tells his story with the use of subplot, on subplot, on subplot; and eloquent, yet detached dialogue. My problem existed because these dialogues, although beautifully written and dropping pure philosophical insight, lacked voice. Kafka, Nakata, and all the other characters all spoke without nuances to set them apart.

A few hundred pages in, and subplots seemed non sequitur. I am a patient reader, always regarding works in their entirety, but without clever dialogue, I was beginning to lose hope. Somewhere, about three quarters into the book, Murakami masterfully stitches together these subplots. Like buying furniture from Ikea, Murakami illustrates the pieces in a heap: a nut here, some screws there, and a few planks of faux wood. He assembles the pieces, and the end result is cohesive, and functional. Beauty and sadness are symbiotic. I am convinced the lack of voice was not only purposeful, but expertly chosen by Murakami to be secondary to the interactions of the subplots and characters.

Kafka On The Shore was my first Murakami book, and I was not only impressed, but mystified. It provokes the same kind of feelings as the grandeur of nature. Picture staring into a canyon, and feeling futile in the bigness of it all; or being lost in an old forest watching shards of light peering through the leaves. Read this if you liked the Evangelion Neon Genesis series, and reciprocate that if you've enjoyed the book.

I like magical realism as much as the next person, but I'm not entirely satisfied with what Murakami has in this novel. Although there is a germ for several fascinating stories, none of them play out to a satisfying conclusion. There is an Oedipal subtext which is well done, even if the identity of the father is never known. But I found myself raging at the author for not doing anything with the intriguing characters of Johnnie Walker, Col. Sanders and some of the other characters that flitter in and out of the plot.

His writing is beautful thoughout and I particularly enjoyed his thoughtful characterization of the gender-bending librarian and Kafka's possible mother.

It's a book that will stay in my memory, hence the three stars. But I longed for a satisfying ending with some ends tied up, and didn't get that satisfaction.

A good way to judge a book is to consider if it inspired feelings you will always remember and in this regard I am fairly sure that this truly remarkable book will stay with me forever. Being my first Japanese book I had no idea of what to expect but what a surprise (a pleasant one that is). I found this book - on love, life and growing up - to be a real page turner. The novel is difficult to get into but once inside you are treated to a magical mystery tour of a young boy's first step into adulthood.

Murakami may at some points be going a bit off the limb with his metaphors and allegories (he is no Fitzgerald in this area of writing) and one could even argue that the book is 100 pages to long but it doesn't matter because the scene, the characters are so exiting that it is hard to put down.

To put it the same way one of the books main characters: "I want you to remember me. If you remember me, then I don't care if everybody else forgets." - and yes I will remember and I will read more works of this strange, mystical author.

Like a few reviewers have said, I thought the first half of the story was great but something was lacking in the second half. Perhaps it's the venture into the spiritual realm that got some readers, me included, frustrated in the second half. A big part of Japanese culture is the belief in the spirit of animate and inanimate objects -- every object has a spirit within and they can travel to multiple realms, including the one inhabited by humans. This perhaps could explain the wierdness experienced by non-Japanese readers when reading about the spiritual realm of things.

Many things, mostly the metaphysical, are discussed in Kafka on the Shore. But the one thing that was stressed on near the end of the novel is: memories. What defines us as humans are our individual memories and experiences. Our memories are what made each one of us different. For all of us, these memories can be painful to recall or bring sweetness to our lives. People with bad memories tend to view life negatively and question the meaning of their life: if life is bad and causing me to have painful memories, why do I go on living? The answer is: To keep the spirits of our loved ones alive. The dead are gone and they have no memories -- it's like they never existed. By remembering them, even if it's painful for us, we keep them alive. Hence we must keep on living for as long as we can to keep our loved ones alive. This is what I think Murakami is trying to say.

An intertextual transfictional tour de force that never loses sight of itself as a novel. The latter is what makes Murakami so readable as he writes about our common, and age old, humanity using myth, music, and literature itself as the age old tools of understanding and expression of our experiences of the situations we keep finding ourselves in. However it is, perhaps, a bit over long.

I'm not sure what to make of this novel. Murakami's a favorite of several friends of mine whose opinions I respect. Perhaps I should have heeded one friend's advice and read THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE as my introduction to Murakami.

KAFKA ON THE SHORE follows two basic plotlines. The first is of a 15-year-old runaway, Kafka Tamura, who finds a home and an education in a small-town library. The second is of an elderly man, Nakata, who lost his memory and his ability to read in a strange, X-files-esque wartime incident when he was a young boy. He lives on government subsidy and supplements his living finding runaway cats. He's uniquely suited for this job because he has the ability to talk to cats.

It gets stranger from there. Characters from modern marketing, a transsexual, an indestructible worm blob creature, and a former pop music icon turned librarian populate what is one of the more bizarre novels I've read in awhile. I don't know enough about Japanese or experimental literature to know to which tradition KAFKA owes its lack of closure. I don't mind that so much as I mind the ever-changing rules of the story, or at least the unclear rules of the story. The randomness of things is fine, but it's hard to feel a sense of tension when things happen and the reader doesn't know if those things are good or bad. Am I supposed to be afraid? Amazed? Happy? Sad?

I certainly found the book interesting and kept reading if for nothing else to find out what insane thing happened next. High marks for originality, but I needed a better understanding of what was going on, or why things were going on, to be fully drawn into the story and care about the characters.

Heavily layered with Greek and Christian symbolism that makes it fascinating to think and talk about but detracts from the pleasure of the immediate read. Good choice for a book discussion group with a knowledgeable facilitator who may have read other of his books. Read it alone and you'll likely have to read it several times. Magical realism tests your patience and demands suspension of disbelief.

What a wild ride this bewildering, almost maddening novel is, and what an intensely creative talent author Haruki Murakami shows here. Make no mistake, this book is a challenge to read unless you are open to mystical characters, supernatural phenomena and a willingness to avoid basic story conventions. The basic outline of the plot will give you some idea. Two main characters drive the story. The first is fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura, who runs away from his Tokyo home. He is burdened by his father's dire prophecy that Kafka, like Oedipus, would eventually kill him and sleep with his mother and sister, both of whom fled the family home when Kafka was four. He stays alone in a cheap hotel, and after a blackout period, ends up at a shrine with no memory of the last few hours or how his clothes came to be saturated in blood. The second character is Mr. Nakata, a man in his 70s who lives near the Tamura household in Tokyo. He supplements his welfare subsidy by tracing lost cats, and his success rate is excellent because he can, literally, talk to cats. On the surface, Nakata is a simpleton, unable to read or write, since his memory has been wiped out during WWII by a paranormal incident in the local woods.

Both Kafka and Nakata find themselves in the middle of incomprehensible, sometimes shocking events. In fact, their parallel quests eventually merge, as Nakata feels his way toward realizing his destiny, which is entwined with those of not only Kafka but also Miss Saeki, a fiftyish library director whom Kafka meets on his journey, and get this, the ghost of her at age fifteen. In certain ways, the book is a primer on existentialism, but Murakami does not weigh down his story with heavy, complex arguments about the universe. Instead, he uses his surreal writing style as a means to get to the heart of a poignant question posed by Kafka, who never got over being abandoned by his mother and continues to wonder if being alone means being free. The journey that both Kafka and Nakata take is purposeful, though marred at times by Murakami's intentional excesses, such as bringing to life such advertising images as Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders to play pivotal plot devices. That's when the author's stylized world becomes rather contrived and the narrative even more convoluted as a result. Regardless, it's a powerful read overall for those willing to take this wild toad of a metaphysical ride.

This is an odd volume. I'm not sure what else to say given the fact that the opening pages dwell on a mysterious incident that occurred to a group of students in Japan during World War II, but the subsequent 400 pages never get around to explaining the reason behind that event. If the definition of "post-modern novel" means that the author is free to write about anything that strikes his or her fancy -- such as talking cats, overlapping worlds, long, black, snake-like objects coming out of dead people's mouths -- without feeling the compunction to explain why, than I may need to run screaming back to the Dickens and Hardy section of the library immediately. I fully appreciated Murakami's scene-setting capabilities. There were several pages that read beautifully. I was fully engaged within individual chapters and sections of the book. But as an entity, this novel suffered from the lack of anything that may have resembled a motive or a sense of closure.

I read this book after reading Wind Up Bird Chronicles. It is pretty intense and I really enjoyed it. I want to read it again and hopefully catch/understand a little more. I wish I had access to all of the music mentioned in the book. I find the emphasis on different arraignments interesting.

It definitely has a post modern-ish/Kurt Vonnegut flair. Though I found it very unique and interesting in and of itself.

This is the first time I've read Murakami. I'll give him another chance, as there are parts of this novel that were brilliant. A good chunk of it, unfortunately, was exceedingly pedantic.

The first third was interesting enough, and though I've learned to avoid anything that smacks of 'magic realism' I found that my favorite character was the Siamese, Mimi. I got caught up in the author's dream-like imagery. Murakami builds tension and mystery ...

... and then drops it all unexpectedly. A good third of the book consists of characters trading monologues on metaphor, the nature of genius, the nature of the soul, the nature of identity, et cetera and ad nauseam. The latter part is one soliloquy after another. None of these speeches were even in character - a fifteen year old runaway, a disembodied spirit, a truck driver, a fifty year old woman, and a mentally disabled old man all spoke with the same dull academic voice. It was maddening. I would have quit the book if the first half hadn't been so well written.

Murakami recovers in the final chapters, but the novel would have been stronger with a good 100 pages shaved off.

This is neither an easy nor a comfortable book, but it is worthwhile. The style is incredibly artful: it is a book whose plot gallops along, yet the narrative trickles so slowly and at such an even pace that at times it was difficult to persist with. And if you think those two things sound contradictory, you've got a hell of a ride ahead of you. I really can't make up my mind about it, but I'm still thinking about it, and I believe that's the mark of a good book.

Kafka on the Shore is full of existential musings about whether it's possible to be the master of your own fate, centered on a re-imagining of Oedipus Rex. It's also about isolation, and and about whether you disown or are disowned by the human race. The plot itself progressively entices the reader to suspend more and more disbelief, starting slowly, then adding one strange thing after another until it's really turned into quite a different book to the one you started reading. I am still struggling with the author's intent when it comes to so regularly upending the world he created. He includes an interesting passage discussing the use of such devices, quoting Chekhov's famous advice that a gun seen on the table in Act 1 of a play should eventually be fired. Yet when it starts raining fish in this book, the characters suggest and then laugh off the idea that such strange things could be some kind of metaphor. Reading that, I felt like I was the fish, and hooked squarely on the author's line. That feeling didn't leave me for the rest of the book.

It was worth reading, and I'm still thinking about it.

Wow. A book that sometimes reads like a soulful Coltrane riff, sometimes like the sexy stuff of Prince, and sometimes like Beethoven at his moody, genius best, The novel, part science fiction, part love story, part coming of age, part mystery, is one to take as it comes, sometimes slowly and sometimes faster than breath. Murakami tells the mysterious story of Kafka "the toughest fifteen year old in the world," who is running from his father's Oedipal curse. The story of Nakata, a kindly, illiterate older man is enterwined with and balances the mood of Kafka's tale. Nakata,who speaks to cats and can cause natural disasters is joined in the story by Hoshino, a young truck driver compelled to help Nakata at any cost. This is a sometimes manic, moody and mindful exploration of the possibility of labyrinthine Time loops where people can be thrust into outcomes other than what is meant to be. Nakata and the director of the library, the lovely Miss Saeki, are two people whose lives were affected by such an experience. Both have suffered great losses as a consequence, and both have very weak shadows, which in Murakami's stories define people who have lost their memories, the part of themselves connected to this life. Murakami explores metaphors considered in his other works to new effect. The library is repository of memory. The forest is a place of contentment in being completely oneself. Love and how we do or do not live it define the people of Kafka on the Shore. Sex and gender are well considered themes. Oshima, the library assistant who becomes a friend to Kafka gives insight to Aristophones and the concept of the beloved as ones's other half - male/male, female/female, or male/female - "how we stumble through our life desperately fumbling for our other half." Most readers will sympathise and delight in Kafka's first sexual experiences and mind blowing, as well as heart breaking first love. Murakami creates nuanced minor characters, including talking cats, who move the story toward the climax and often give philosophical substance to their encounters with the main cast. There is one notable hooker who combines the philosophy of Henri Bergson (quoted in my title) with Hegel's thoughts, "At the same time "I" am the content of a relation, "I" am also that which does the relating," and sex takes on a mind boggling tantric twist for Hoshino's enlightenment and pleasure. Kafka and the others in this story explore what it means to be a truly free human, how we mostly trap ourselves into mindsets and habits that do not support loving kindness to ourselves as well as others, and how by actually giving ourselves over to what is needed and what we can do about it, we become untrapped, never bored, and in love with our time of life. This is one of the books I will pick up to read again in part and in total, because I think it speaks to all ages, and it does so with humor, warmth, intelligence and love for the everyman.

I actually discovered this book based on an the store recommendation and immediately fell in love with Murakami's writing. His writings carry a dreamlike quality, with a large, blurred area between reality and fantasy. We are invited to delve into the psyche of his many characters and explore their personal stregnths, as well as their conflicts. In the end, many of the characters paths converge. But, tantalizingly enough, many questions in the plot and in the characters are left unanswered, giving the reader the challenge of resolving these riddles. I came away from this book looking for more, and am on my way to reading his other works.

May contain SPOILERS

Murakami is a daring writer. Not only because, in his novel, a 15-year-old has sex with a fifty-year old woman, that is almost certainly his mother, or because a character, dressed as Johnnie Waker, slices cats open and eats their hearts, it's not because of the explicit sex or the talking cats and raining fish, it's because he never explains his novel, leaving more loose ends than you can possibly imagine, he never attempts to put some sense in his dreamy, trippy world, leaving a lot to be guessed. Not that I was frustrated by it, in fact, I think that it couldn't have ended in any other way, if more was answered the whole dreamy aspect of the novel would have gone down the drain, which would pretty much ruin the whole thing.
The story is amazingly interesting,specially because of it's weirdness, the only major problem is that the characters felt a little unrealistic, maybe it's because of all the absurdities that happened to them and around them or maybe is the way they talk, the dialogue, altought I did enjoy the small pieces of philosophy in it, gets a little stilted at times.

This was certainly a compelling read though, upon reaching the end, a significant source of disappointment as the various lines of surrealism are never reconciled with each other and with the overall plot. In this sense the novel is much like an extended dream sequence, with magical elements that are unexplained and don't follow the laws of cause and effect (Nakata must get to Takamatsu, but when he does his task upon arriving there is rather pedestrian and the novel is not at all clear as to why he is the one who needs to complete it. And whatever happened to Nakata in his childhood, anyway? And who killed who?). Reminiscent of David Lynch's Lost Highway.
On the other hand, certain characters hold forth on the philosophy of life as though reading from their graduate school essays.
Despite these complaints, the novel is quite enjoyable, particularly if one doesn't hope to understand it all by the end.

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.

Despite what another official review on this page says, I was very bothered by the "loose threads" at the end of this novel. Kafka is a great story, by turns realistic, fantastic, touching and gruesome. Murakami puts out many ideas and concepts here, such as time, space, identity, life after death, and some Stephen King-like creepiness. But by the time the reader reaches the end of this very imaginative work, everything ends up on a limp, flat note, as if Murakami did not know how to pull together all the various aspects of his story. It's a wonderful book, but prepare for a possible letdown at the finish.

The brilliance of the book is the character development and how much you end up caring about them. The suspense or attempted suspense of the story is interesting but I sometimes would get frustrated because I felt like it was at the expense of further character development. As always, Murakami's writing (or the translation) is beautiful.

This is the first Murakami book I read. It changed my life. I read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle immediately afterward, and both books for me completely transformed my vision of life and fiction and the possibilities for both. If I traced a path of imaginative fiction, starting probably with the miracle stories, to the twentieth century with Kafka, then García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, these two books by Murakami have reached farther out than any of them. Kafka was the inspiring luminary, so it's not surprising to me that his name happened to wind up in the title of this book. García Márquez talks about when he first read Kafka, how reading about a man who woke up a cockroach opened his imagination. I think Murakami has the same impact today. For that alone, he deserves the Nobel Prize. But also, Murakami has the ability to reach further into the subconscious and the relationships among human (and animal!) spirits than most other authors. I was disappointed in his last novel, After Dark, because he didn't seem committed enough to what he was writing to explore things to the end. But he is my favorite writer, and I look forward to whatever he puts out next.

I am a huge fan of Mura-kami which explains why I am generally disappointed with this piece. What started as initially challenging, original, inspired and complex turned sour the minute Naka-ta passed away and disintegrated into a banal farce and what is probably best described as a Sunday reader.

To understand Mura-kami is to understand that he has three distinct levels of writing; sublime, so-so and 'please put the pen down and find a new profession'. Mura-kami has within him absolute sublime greatness: Norwegian Wood, Hardboiled, Dance-Dance, South of the Border; abject averageness -Sputnik, Underground, and what one can only assume amounts to publishing or contractual obligations - Birthday Stories (ed.) and After Dark. This work represents Mura-kami in his 'so-so' mode.

Whilst this work started out as a thoroughbred it soon became clear it was no more than a 'noma-uma' (a miniature Shi-koku pony). Mura-kami Haruki (rather like artist Mura-kami Takashi) is all too often held up and praised in a way that is reminiscent of the whole adoration of the Oriental by the Occidental, and thus he is often cut way too much slack and given far too much freedom to manoeuver, when his counterparts would be herded and slaughtered. He is rather treaded with kid-gloves as some romantic projection of the West's eternal and unyielding fascination with all things Japanese and what ensues therefore is mediocrity and banality passed off as Post-modernism and surrealism. For my money, bad is bad. Poor plots will remain forever so, despite any supposed references or allusion to ontological or philosophical leanings and the ever-present musical musings.

Mura-kami's genius though does shine through in the first half of the book, and when it shines one is reminded of his greatness and the need to wear sunglasses in his presence. But as the sun faded mid-way through and the magic was gone, then the fact of loss is all the sadder, and all the more painful to bear.

Despite what some people are saying, Murakami is no Kakfa, Camus, Sartre, Mann, Hesse, Beckett, etc. He tries to grapple with some of the same issues as these literary greats -- i.e. the subconscious, other Freudian and Jungian concepts, absurdism, "fate", free will, responsibility, the nature of morality, etc. -- but he does so at a level that is really not that deep or complex. Which probably accounts for the his wide popularity and acceptance...

My take on Kafka on the Shore is that the book is sort of like Harry Potter for adults. Its plot is interesting enough, bizarre enough, and clever enough to keep you hooked. Murakami deserves credit for that. The book, as John Updike said in his review in the New Yorker, is "a real page-turner."

But I really doubt that the book is also, as Updike puts it, a "metaphysical mind-bender." Murakami deals with issues from philosophy and psychology that are in fact very interesting (if somewhat outdated). But his writing doesn't take us much further or deeper into these issues than, say, a pretty good undergraduate paper would. By contrast, truly great works of literature do, I think, grapple with philosophical and psychological issues with the same level of insight, complexity, and sophistication that the great works of philosophy and psychology do.

Sure, Murakami is an entertaining writer. But let's not get carried away in comparing him to some of the greatest writers of all time. He writes, plain and simple, what some critics are calling "pop literature". Certainly, there's room in the publishing world for all sorts of writers, especially in this day and age when there is a growing demand for literature that is highly entertaining and easily accessible. And it doesn't hurt that Murakami's work (like so many of Charlie Kaufman's movies...) leaves a lot of readers feeling smart, philosophical, and "deep" for having read his work. Just because his work can engender such feelings in the reader, however, doesn't mean that the work itself possesses these characteristics.

So Murakami is no intellectual giant. Big deal. This book is still entertaining, and if that's what you're looking for, Kafka on the Shore will take you for a pretty fun ride. If you want "deep" philosophical insights or complex psychology, you won't find it here.

In summary, Murakami is to "real" philosophy/psychology as McCullough is to "real" history. But, hey, the masses love McCullough. And they seem to love Murakami, too. And in the publishing world, that's what really matters, not what a few intellectual snobs up in the Ivory Tower think.

I should begin this review by mentioning that I'm an avid Murakami fan. Aside from UNDERGROUND and his upcoming 1Q84, I've read everything he's ever written (in some cases multiple times) and even went through much of NORWEGIAN WOOD in the original Japanese.

I originally attempted KAFKA ON THE SHORE in 2006, while living in Japan. At the time I was suffering a bit of fatigue from the culture and figured that was a major part of the reason for a sour reaction to the first 150 pages. Recently (Mid 2011) I decided to give it another go (starting from the beginning), committing myself to finishing it this time.

My familiarity and appreciation for Murakami's work sets a high standard -- I've read some amazing things by him and I know what he's capable of -- and unfortunately KOTS fails to meet this standard.

KOTS has four major issues:

1) Purple Prose -- Perhaps this was a translation issue but KOTS's prose was sappy and overly poetic. There were too many over the top similes (e.g. "like a wind blowing on the edge of the world") and an overuse of broad, bland words (e.g. darkness). I found myself fighting the language in order to understand and picture the scenes; not a good sign when you're trying to get your reader to _forget_ they're reading a story.

2) Editing -- This seems to be a problem with many successful authors. They reach a point where it becomes increasingly difficult to either self-edit, accept edits from others or find an honest editor. KOTS was full of redundant scenes (so much so that even the characters and/or narrator commented on it) or actions which served no purpose other than to tread plot. The paperback edition of KOTS was 467 pages, but it told a story that could've fit into 250-300 pages.

3) Deus Ex Machina -- Even when a story is bent to make a deus ex machina appear meaningful (usually through spiritual, metaphysical or magic realism justifications), they're rarely satisfying for the reader. KOTS put its characters on quests which resolved themselves, without playing by any sort of consistent or logical framework. Even in a fantastical world, there needs to be some sense of cause and effect rather than "we needed to find X and hey, X just appeared."

4) Characters -- This is probably the biggest problem with KOTS and had Murakami succeeded here, it would've dampened the effect of the above three issues. Simply put, I went through 470 pages without caring much about any of the characters save for _maybe_ Oshima. Out of the main characters, Nakata and Hoshino are irritatingly simple (and quite boring) while Kafka and Miss Saeki come off as forced, reacting to situations in a scripted manner.

There are also issues with the overly expository dialogue (show, don't tell!) and the overly specific details ("He played the Radiohead Kid A disc on his Sony Walkman while drinking his Diet Pepsi"), but they pale in comparison to the above.

BUT!

There's at least one thing that Murakami did very well. He's always had a knack for describing solitary scenes, such as Kafka's time in Oshima's cabin or Kafka's trip through the woods. He's adept at showing both sides to the solitary life, both the necessary routines as well as the debilitating eeriness of it. It's a shame there's not more of this in KOTS, as it feels like every character has a buddy at some point or another.

All in all, I'd have to recommend skipping KAFKA ON THE SHORE and putting your time towards either one of Murakami's tighter works or towards a different novel altogether. This one's not worth the time unless you're looking to add a Murakami-notch to your belt.

Having never heard of Murakami prior to the publication of Kafka on the Shore, I resisted purchasing it time and again. After all, it does not follow that simply because one employs a particularly beloved signifier in a title, that the object signified by said title accrues some metaphysical value, which is not credited to texts bereft of such clever strategies. Indeed, one must be quite bold to actually invoke "Kafka" before many who will examine and possibly read it has any other experience of one's work. As it turns out, Murakami is absolutely justified in his appropriation of Kafka's name in title of this wondrous work of imaginative brilliance.

Notwithstanding the very real and significant contributions Freud made to our understanding to the workings of the mind, I maintain that his true claim to fame is as the greatest mythologist of the 20th century, especially in his later writings, and most especially in his books dealing with the socio-political foundations of society--The Future of an Illusion & Totem and Taboo come to mind--and commentary on such relations, which are found throughout his work. In order to walk away from these amazing books having gained anything of value, one has to be willing to give Freud a certain amount of artistic license and suspend disbelief. Having done so, the payoff is immense. For example, I found that The Future of an Illusion is a perfect way to off-set Aristotle, J. S. Mill, and old Manny Kant, in that it offers a such a radically different account of the foundations of and motivation to morality that students must rethink all of the theories from beginning to end. (I don't use Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals for reasons of temporal economy.)

A similar act of faith is the very condition of the possibility of reading much more than 15 pages of this work of shockingly expansive imagination. As something of a fetishist for magical realism, I am more than prepared to have characters give birth to cats, dance with the devil, and defy the never questioned convention that holds that nature is ruled by certain unbreakable laws, such as gravity, when, in fact, the strongest claim that we can make as to the continuation gravity's felicitous effects is that they have not failed to obtain to this point in human history, as far as we know. I must say, however, that neither de Bernieres (I am thinking not of Corelli's Mandolin, but of his early trilogy, which elaborates the history of the fantastic village of Cochadebajo, which is in the same metaphysical neighborhood as the village to which Kafka Tamura, the title character as you will have guessed, travels in seeking to achieve what Nietzsche calls the most difficult task: becoming what one is.)nor Borges, Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita) nor Allende, not even Garcia Marquez,the Master himself, prepared me in the least for what lay ahead in Kafka on the Shore.

Frankly, Murakami is in a league all his own. He requires not simply that we suspend disbelief, but that, in addition, we suspend all belief as well. In order to fully enjoy such an adventure as he has created in Kafka on the Shore, it is necessary that we do everything we can to approach the text with a tabula rosa. The less we know--or, shall I say ironic as this combination of words may appear, the less we believe ourselves to know, the more receptive we will be to the actuality of the work of art that is in front of us.

There are plenty of talented, even brilliant writers. There are even quite a few whose talents reach far beyond a technical competence for putting a story together in a coherent and compelling fashion, but I have never encountered a writer with the temerity of Murakami. Kafka on the Shore would be just as easily at home in a class introducing metaphysics, specifically regarding time and identity, as in a survey of postmodern or contemporary fiction. Indeed, I would have hesitated not to give it a double classification Literature/Philosophy were I a publisher more interested in veracity than in the philosophy of money.

One could easily write a book on Murakami's theory of time, the profound elaborations of which I have not seen the likes of since Faulkner's Oh, Jerusalem I Forget Thee, or Wild Palms. Likewise, there is an entire physics of identity, which lay at the heart of the book. One, moreover, which is rather Freudian, to say the least. For as it turns out, Kafka seeks nothing more than to avoid his father's curse that he will be murdered by Kafka, who will then sleep with this mother and his sister: Aeschylus by the Shore just does not have the right ring to it.

Starting off from this premise--of which the reader remains ignorant well into the text--Kafka, who is 15, runs away from home and by virtue of a force no more under the power of his will than pure contingency, he ends up in Takamatsu. As serendipity would have it, this is the very same town to which Mr. Nakata, who has murdered Kafka's father--ignoring the fact that he somehow deposits bloody evidence some distance away from the scene of the crime, where Kafka happens to have blacked out--also eventually travels. Mr. Nakata is one of the more interesting characters in literary history. He is not very smart, not being able to read or write, but he has the singular ability to converse with cats. That is, until he encounters Johnny Walker; whether Mr. Walker is red, black, or blue we have no indication. Suffice it to say that Colonel Sanders is dealing in something more than 12 original herbs and spices these days; though the women for whom he serves as pimp are spicier than anything one may find on one's fried hen, if the example we are introduced to is any indication. Yet, he remains a friend to the community and not simply a trafficker in sex, for without him neither Kafka, Mr. Nakata, nor any number of secondary characters would be able to fulfill their destinies.

So, are you following me? No? Good, then you have some idea, however penurious and nebulous, of what it is like to take a trip to the shore in the mind of Haruki Marakami. Hell, Kafka reads like Kant when placed beside this fantastic phantasmagoric writer the internal logic of whose book is unimpeachable. And this is perhaps the most stunning feat of all the various and sundry Enquirer like activiities that occur in the novel; this most impossible narrative turns out to have been obeying the laws of (dia)logical formations from the very beginning. Though it takes far longer to comprehend this than it does in your average everyday ontologically unstable narrative, the events of the story have unfolded according to a certain necessity, which was laid out from the very first pages: absolutely stunning!

In short, I recommend this intellectual adventure to everyone who thinks it exciting to think differently than one did the day before, and is willing to continue to have one's thinking evolve to the point of devolution. Fortunately, and perhaps this is the true gift that Murakami possesses, the author takes us time and time to the edge of reason and sense, only to pull us back just when we have been convinced that it may be best, if we were to go ahead and plunge body and mind into the abyss. Indeed, for those whose intellectual promiscuity is somewhat more reckless than the average homo sapien, it would be difficult not to feel let down at having been teased with the possibility of a beautifully transgressive literary experience, were it not for the fact that the next available opportunity for trying on a novel identity is found on the very next page or sooner. I do, however, have one rather serious warning; Kafka on the Shore is not for herd animals or for anyone who believes that syllogistic logic is the be all and end all of human intellectual achievemenet, which really amount to the same thing, when one thinks about it. Long live narrative and ontological uncertainty! Long live Haruki Murakami!

Murakami is at the point in his career where we can speak of "vintage" Murakami, and this has many of the familiar traits that will make it successful and a engaging read: two narratives that begin as unrelated and slowly converge, magic realistic elements leavening the story, an elemental role given to music (and its evaluation) as part of characters' awakening, and of course an enthralling narrative.

Unfortunately, it just doesn't come together--or better put, Murakami hasn't resolved many of the novel's dangling issues that may make novel writing a bit tedious but ultimately endow the work with rewarding coherence.

I'll try not to be tedious myself, but here are a few of the major questions that are never addressed, let alone resolved. The novel is governed by a father's Oedipal curse upon his son, which 15-yr-old Kafka runs away from home to escape. Kafka "seems" to fulfill the curse, but we never know whether it is the realm of dreams (or an alternative reality), or in some way real. For example, he wakes up with blood soaking him the night of his father's murder, but Nakata seems to have been the killer who entered a fairy-tale world where he kills Johnny Walker, a demon who represents the monster patriarch (though we're not told how or why the elder Tamura takes this form). Needless to say, we never learn who killed Tamura in the conventional world. Likewise, Kafka "seems" to sleep with his sister (part of the curse) and a woman who may or may not be a lover from a past life or his mother--we never know. After all this cosmic transgression and ritual pollution we would expect some fallout for the oedipal lad, but the novel's ending drops the whole topic without attempting to either demonstrate how Kafka outwitted fate or that his father uttered a false curse as part of his plan to torment his son, who he may resent.

Confused? Well, there are problems galore: Nakata's a great character--perhaps the work's most endearing--but what exactly happened to him sixty years earlier as a child to restructure his mind? Was that distant plane that immobilized a group of school children really a plane? We're meant to strongly suspect not, but we're never told what it in fact was and how it transformed Nakata. Likewise, the novel's seminal scene may involve the metaphysical completion of Nakata and Miss Saeki, which allows her the spiritual release from memories that plague her, but why is Nakata the vehicle and how does he "restore what's here now to the way it should be"? In terms of the novel's logic, we're never told what his connection to her is, or why "the entrance stone" has opened for him to cure her and how that affects Kafka.

It's frustrating: I am a genuine fan of Murakami's work, and even recommend this novel with considerable qualification (I'm sure that's obvious by now), but it falls short of such past accomplishments as "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and ..." or "Wind-up Bird Chronicle," though it is significantly better than "Dance, Dance, Dance."

Murakami is up to his old tricks, thinking lofty thoughts about how lives translate into narrative, and how narrative gives shape to life, and what happens to human experience, desire, and identity when you eschew History (where time marches forward, with regularity, in waking life, in individuated consciousnesses) for a different set of narrative rules. His grand-schemed playfulness in this novel reminded me powerfully of the Matrix trilogy. As a work of literature, it's not transcendent like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but it's compulsively readable for a novel about such Big Ideas, and outstandingly intelligent for a summer page-turner.

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.

I liked this book. It was my first by Mr. Murakami, and it was a pretty easy read. The story wasn't anything mind-blowing, but it did keep my interest throughout. I liked the author's simple style and most of the characters were well drawn. My biggest problem is the ending. Nothing is really explained in the end. There's all these interesting threads running through the story, but many questions are left unanswered (who killed Kafka's father? Was Sakura his sister? Was Miss Saeki his mother? What happened to Nakata as a child?). Sometimes I don't mind that in a novel, especially if it was entertaining enough to keep me up at night, but Kafka on the Shore, while interesting, didn't really blow me away (the incest theme and the cat killing scene certainly didn't help in that regard), so I definitely needed a satisfying conclusion to make it worthwhile.

Overall, it was an interesting novel that would have been a lot better had the ending answered some of the fundamental questions asked throughout the novel. I might give the author another try in the future (perhaps trying one of his better-reviewed novels like Wind-Up or Hard-Boiled) but I'm not in any hurry. I borrowed Kafka on the Shore from the library, and I'm glad I didn't spend any money on it. I suggest that interested readers do the same.

3 and a 1/2 stars.

So this was the first book I've read in quite some time. Probably the first I've read to completion in ten years. I've never been much of a reader is what it comes down to. This book drew me in. The author describes everything in a sense where you feel like you're there. The story itself left me thinking about the characters and what would happen next even when not reading.

I read this book shortly after reading Murakami's "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle." I found that both stories had much of the same themes and writing style. I was a little disappointed because I was not expecting there to be so much similarity between the two books. However, the plot is pretty different than Wind Up, so it was still a very enjoyable read. Kafka on the Shore is more of a coming of age story. Between the two, I enjoyed Win Up Bird Chronicle more, but it might be because I read it first.

...Of course, this is just my opinion. It takes a lot for me to dub a book my favorite, or even "The Greatest Book of All Time", but this one has done it. Before, the greatest book I had ever read was Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov, and that held the top spot on my bookshelf for seven years. Now it has been replaced.

It's not a stretch by any means to say that Murakami is my favorite author, or that I am intrigued by Japan...because he is, and I am a Japanese major. However, this book is not for people who are obsessed with Japan per se, seeing as how it has a lot of Western cultural references. Murakami loves Jazz, Classic Rock, American movies and the like. His novels are set in Japanese, but they are and are not uniquely Japanese.

The main thing with Murakami's novels is the distinct mixture of the mundane and the surreal. You may feel as if you are reading about a totally ordinary character, and then something switches and blows every notion you had right out of the water. Whether it's talking to cats, fish raining from the sky, or an Oedipal prophecy come true, these characters are not normal. Or boring.

I had read nine of Murakami's novels prior to this one, with Hard-Boiled Wonderland and Wind-Up Bird waiting in the wings. However, I can't bring myself to open another book by him. Kakfa On The Shore is just so perfect and magical to me, that I do not want to spoil it.

As you can see from the other reviews, this is a complex work that seems to have even staunch fans of Murakami torn over whether it indicates growth or regression. As you can guess from my rating, I'm definitely a fan of this piece.

Much like The Wind-up Bird Chronicles, I was continually finding myself jarred, and my frame of mind shaken by the ethereal substance of this book. Murakami finds ways to expose his characters to the most bizarre of psychological phenomena while managing to drag the reader along, half convinced such an episode might just truly happen. I think the core of the book lies in a comment that Oshima makes, about what the world would be like if exteriors were interiors of a person, and the true substance an exterior. Many have touched on the endearing qualities of Nakata, but I was just as enthralled by the tragic Miss Seiki (Psyche?), and enigmatic Oshima.

I'm still finding difficulty, having just finished, in fully formulating the impact and power of this piece in words. Following the advise of the character, Sada, I will not bother to continue attempting to force into words what cannot be described ... at least, outside of the full-length allegory that is Kafka on the Shore.

I went in having had no previous experience with Murakami, so I would recommend this novel to others the same. If you check out the negative reviews you'll see that some people really hate this book! I can understand why, and I do agree on some points. (It can get obvious and pretentious in parts, but to me the whole /was/ greater than the sum of its parts.)

I enjoyed the characters, the tension, the scenery. Oshima in particular is a really well-crafted character - one of my favourite characters from recent literature. I won't go into plot details and character relationships, but I will say that I enjoyed this book enough to go back and re-read it a few months later. (And I love cats, so that was a bit of effort.)

Regarding other people's complaints - soft porn, pointless violence, meaningless entertainment, shallow philosophy - quite honestly, I enjoy a bit of those sometimes! It's perfect if you're looking for something to pick up and escape into. The loose threads that most Murakami readers hate just don't bother me here. Having said that, I've only read Kafka and the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (which I didn't enjoy as much).

To finish off this roundabout review, I'll only say that I enjoyed it and it's worth a read! The protagonist is easy to get along with, the split narrative style kept me turning the pages and the whole thing was generally a good read. It's not light reading but it won't drag you to the edges of emotion either. Recommended.

Went from Norwegian wood which I found a brilliant piece of work on life and death to Kafka on the shore.

Murakamis style of writing is very unique. It definitely engages the reader and creates an accessible world even if it is nuts. This book is subjective but being pragmatic is about acceptance, personal growth, concepts of time and fate, relationships and the personal philosophy of the main characters. There is a lot of stuff that is open to interpretation that only the author can describe which he never will. A bit off the deep end in terms of symbolism and metaphor but none the less gets the imagination going.

At first glance, Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore looks big and dense. On the other hand, it does not feel as such. Chapters fly by as the plot thickens: it's a page-turner. However, at the core of the novel Murakami is attempting just what his novel looks like: something bigger and more far-reaching than a potboiler.

The novel at once tells the story of Kafka Tamura and Nakata. Kafka is "the world's toughest fifteen-year-old." After running away from his father in Tokyo, he begins on a journey to a new life to find his mother and sister who left when he was little while at the same time drawn by some force to the island of Shikoku. Nakata is an elderly man whose mental abilities were compromised in a freak accident during World War II. He is also left with a strange gift, however: the ability to talk to cats. The two characters are drawn together as the mysteries behind Kafka's family, Nakata's past, and the past of a beautiful and tragic librarian, Ms. Saeki, are unraveled.

The strengths of the book lie in the wealth of characters that Murakami creates. They are all unique: Hoshino, "a sleepy-looking man in his mid-twenties, not very tall, with a ponytail, a pierced ear, and a Chunichi Dragons baseball team cap" who helps Nakata on his search, Oshima, an attractive hermaphrodite, among some. Murakami shows his skill as a writer in the way that he creates them all distinctly, but binds them closer and closer together. It is the human connections in the book that help solve the mysteries of Kafka and Nakata. Even when these connections are not conventional, say the romance between an older woman and Kafka, Murakami finds the beauty in these relationships.

Throughout the book, the influences of both traditional and modern Japanese culture show. The book carries more than a hint of Japanese spiritualism. Nakata talks to a rock, ghosts appear from the past, and a spirit incarnated as Colonel Sanders even appears to guide Hoshino. There is never a sense that one power is driving the strange revelations and coincidences in the lives of the characters, but of many different spiritual entities. Some of the most important scenes in the book take place in dreams. It is in these dreams that the true nature of people is revealed. As in Murakami's other novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the shadow of World War II still looms as an important event for Nakata. Lastly, the people that Murakami explores in his book are not he people who fit perfectly into Japanese society. Kafka tries to live alone, "...I have zero friends. I've built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside," he says. Nakata is also alone after his accident when he cannot perform to the standards of society.

Kafka on the Shore leaves much to be desired: there are many unanswered questions and seemingly loose ends when it is finished. Do not expect Murakami to wrap these things up for you because he enjoys leaving the reader to hypothesize and draw their own conclusions, on many levels, from his book.

Yet again, Murakami has created a world of enigmas and spacious silences that, on his terms, makes a kind of sense. The other reviewers are right to point out that there are loose ends not tied up, but that seems minor when the characters and settings were so memorable. The library on Shikoku, for example, is cleanly fixed in my mind, quiet as a house painted by De Chrico; the conversations betweeen the trucker and Nakata were classic road trip dialogue; the relations among Oshima, Kafka and Miss Saeki are beautifully, patiently drawn. This novel is gorgeous.

So it's not the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I read five years ago and still reverberates with me. It's still well worth reading - twice for that matter.

Finally, check out the excellent website Murakami's American publishers have done at [...] There are two interviews with him and an interesting translators' round table.

My girlfriend gave me this book as a gift. She told me the bookstore where she picked it up kept Murakami books behind the counter due to shoplifting issues. This should give you some indication of how good it is. If kids want to shoplift your book I bet it's freaking great. And you know...it really is. Magical, Compelling, Simple, Surreal. It's all of those things. Prior to reading this book I wasn't a real big surreal fiction fan, but Murakami is a true artist and master of the genre. The translations are spot on. The writing is smooth. The descriptions are vivid. I highly recommend this book to anyone open minded enough, courageous enough, bored enough, interested to read it. You'll like it.

Kafka on the Shore is a great book that is different from many Haruki Murakami's previous works. Many of his characters are relaxed people in their thirties. They go with the flow and do not worry about tomorrow. The personage of the book is a fifteen - year - old boy who's is name is Kafka. He is very mature and determined person. He knows how to push himself. His story is intertwined with the journey of an elderly man named Nakata and a truck driver Hosino. Their story is surreal and magical. It explains Kafka's journey from metaphysical point of view. With reading on, it becomes absolutely clear that these two stories complement each other.

I have read many books of Haruki Murakami. I find them very deep in spite of the easy language the writer usually uses. He has this talent to impart the atmosphere and feelings of his characters. Just as his other books, Kafka on the Shore gives rise to different, sometimes contrary, emotions. The book brings diverse thoughts.

Kafka on the Shore is especially strong to me because I have reached the age when a person realizes that going with the flow is impossible and starts looking for one's own way and purpose. The book truly opens this side of Kafka's emotional experiences.

The only weakness of this book is its ending. The plot becomes overextended and predictable. The main part of Haruki Murakami's works has this problem. It does not irritate me because many writers do this. I also believe that the goal of the book is to get a writer's thought to a reader. In many cases the ending becomes a sort of framing for the main idea and then it does not matter. Kafka on the shore is among those cases. Haruki Murakami wants his readers to participate in the process and arrive at their own conclusions.

Kafka on the Shore is the book for younger people who do not mind metaphysical tendencies in literature. It is for people with imagination who like to think on and "digest" a book for some time after reading it. I would also recommend this book to the people that like different and odd books.

Kafka on the Shore is a book that hypnotizes and leaves a reader attached.

Lovely writing but slow going. This is the first Murakami I've read, and I admit that I had a hard time making myself finish.

There is a lot going for this book - the writing (and translation, really) is beautiful and smooth. The characters are interesting and distinct, there is a wealth of detail on culture and atmosphere, and the story is interesting. It was bizarre, but it was meant to be - the supernatural elements of the story were well-handled, for the most part. The back and forth sections between narrators, complete with changes between first- and third-person perspective, kept the story fresh.

But while I was curious to see what happened, the story just took so long to become interesting that I was itching to move on to something else. I like character set-up, I really do, but it seems like half of this very long book is nothing but character set-up, and nothing of real significance happens for ages. The young main character is fifteen years old, and while the story hammers home (and hammers and hammers) how unusually mature he is, I still found it difficult to accept him as fifteen, in spite of that fact being integral to the story.

The ambiguous and open-ended conclusion fit with the story, but it was also one more thing that had me grateful to move on to something with a little more pizazz. Good book, great writing, glad it's over.

Great book and Murakami seemingly leads you down two different roads, that of a lost young man and and elderly mentally challenged eccentric. Over time we see how their stories interweave but Murakami is so skillful its like a stream of consciousness dream. You're there before you even realize it and like the soft edges of a dream it passes you by as you attempt to hold on. A wonderful novel for anybody interested in superior writing and a great story but I warn you its a slow one. Don't expect action packed adventure and don't press it for too much too soon or it will just frustrate you. Rather, let it carry you.

This is not an easy read. All of its 600 odd pages are littered with subtle undercurrents making it dense, complex and surreal at times. Often sad and wistful with copious amounts of philosophy, art and music thrown in, Kafka on the shore is never boring. True, parts of it are slower and some parts whizz by. Sometimes you'll feel frustrated at not getting what the author intends to tell you immediately. This book requires some patience. Its not fast food meant to be gobbled up in a quick bite. rather, it is like rare wine meant to be savored.

This is the first Murakami book I have read, so I may be off key in his writing styles and his previous works comparison. I will not reveal the plot, but let you in on the fact that often there isn't one. The author leaves a lot for you to decide in what you want to believe in... 'Everything is a metaphor' he writes and indeed its for you to decide how to decode it. Which is why you'll often find that you can relate to it at different levels. Its a sheer piece of art and you'll either love it or really hate it.

The journey of a 15 year old to clear his warped mind of a curse is intersected with that of 60 year old whose mind is much that of a young adult - unable to read or write. In that sense, the work is allegorical. What one lacks and searches, the other has - opening doorways to age and mind. Alternate chapters detail this journey and their paths cross though they may or may not ever meet physically. Murakami strongly uses the idea of a labrynth and the notion that we are the products of the reality of our minds.

One of the reviewers here remarked that he wasn't sure if Murakami is a Genius or merely someone really clever. I'm not sure myself - for very often you feel that something ordinary must have a hidden meaning in the book. Perhaps that is what the author means to deliver in the book. That our realities and our understandings of everything in this world is a product of who we really are.

A really fine piece of literature that deserves to be amongst the best books written recently.

This is the 4th novel I read for Murakami and it's wonderful. It takes a while to build up momentum but it's totally worth it. Characters will continue to live with you just like all the characters in his books. Absolutely love it :-)

Personally, I think this is Murakami's finest work. The plot is complex but never over-written as it goes back and forth between the events of the two main characters. Occasionally I was left wondering by his style of not always explaining what he wants the reader to think but for me, this is part of the huge appeal of his books. If you like this, I also highly recommend his most famous work, "Norwegian Wood". The recent movie of the same name is also worth watching as I felt it stayed true to the book.

I have read a few Murakami novels, and I have to admit a bit of disappointment with this one. In this work it is as if he wrote a novel which is clearly centered around some mystical phenomenon that unites the experience of all the principal characters, then edited out all direct references to it, leaving only a shell around it. The rest of us us can only guess as to how all the various strands of narrative tie together. The effect is more enigmatic but less haunting than in, say, Hard-Boiled Wonderland.

However, the tone is somewhat warmer than his other works, and does not suffer from the lack of his usual disaffected 30-something male protagonist. The tale and the characters themselves are quite engaging and enjoyable during the read. It only really suffers in its paucity of closure.

If you like his work and enjoy the idea of puzzling out the possibly non-existent substance behind an ethereal tale, by all means check it out.

Kafka on the Shore is what would happen if Franz Kafka and Chuck Palahnuik got together and had a baby.

This novel is about Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway, and the elderly Nakata, who never recovered from a mysterious coma when he was a child. It is hard to become taken immediately with Kafka (if at all) whom has no recollection of his mother or sister (but definitely has some sort of oedipal complex), however it is easy to fall instantly in love with Nakata. I rarely become involved with characters, I am merely an observer, but when confronted with the brilliant portrayal of Nakata I couldn't help but feel for him.

We are presented with both their stories on their journey to one another, or to themselves as the case may be. Kafka is nothing more than a boy who has suffered through the abandonment of his mother, he mental abuse from his father and his terrifying prophecy. He runs away from home and finds drawn to a private library and things begin to fall into place.

Nakata on the other hand is an illiterate elderly man living on a sub city, earning some extra money finding cats (because he can talk to them) and finding himself on a journey that he doesn't understand. Fish and leeches fall from the sky, Colonel Sanders is embodied and books are read.

The characters all seem a little too erudite, talking like they have all the knowledge in the world and as though the only way that Murakami could get his point across was having someone explain it directly. But that doesn't make it any easier to understand, the book is rife with existentialisms (a subject I will admit to not caring for), hidden meanings and some pretty strange themes that I wasn't all that comfortable with. At times it became a little convoluted.

The books starts off magnificently but starts to slide off into a tangent that is little more than predictable, trying to make sense of everything and tying it into a little bundle but in the end leaves many things inadequately explained. The novel has so much potential such as brilliantly written characters and an interesting scenario, but falters towards the end. This is my introduction to Murakami and certainly will not be the last.

Murakami is a genius, and this book is but one tiny shred of evidence. I have heard rumors that he may win the nobel prize for literature (for IQ84, I'm assuming?)The mystery he creates is so amazing and it is just delightful to push your brain to pick it all a part. It was an absolutely beautiful story about essentially not being able to run or hide from your past. It is a shame more people do not read Murakami. I walk out into a Starbucks right now and ask each person inside if they had heard of him, and I doubt I would find a single one. But, anyone fortunate enough to be turned onto reading Murakami will quickly recognize they are experiencing the work of a true artist. I am so grateful that he exists.

I read this book years ago and really enjoyed the process of reading it. Very few books have the ability to embed in the subconscious effecting you on more then one layer. This for me was one such book. I have tried others by the author and did not adore them all. I guess it often comes down to timing and the individual as to what makes a favorite among his various works. This read was unique and effecting (for me).

I have read all of Mr. Murakami's books and he is by far my favorite author. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is my all time favorite book, and this is coming from the son of a librarian that grew up in libraries. I was in Japan when this book came out and it was like Christmas for me. I still have no regrets about buying this book and it was worth the price. I just wish I could meet Mr. Murakami and tell him, please stop with the educating bits. Throughout the book there are long passages where he is trying to teach the reader about literature classical music and jazz. These passages have nothing to do with the plot and are really tiring. I'm sitting on my couch reading and I don't want to put the book down, and suddenly I have to read these inserts where the characters suddenly stop being who they are and turn into Mr. Murakami telling us how good a piece of music is, or something about Greek mythology. I want to know about these incredible characters he has created. I don't need or want these insertions that take away from the flow of the book. That said, keep them coming please sir, and thank you for lighting my world during the dark times.

the only reason kafka on the shore is not a 5 star rating is because of what it stands against in murakami's backlist. for most other authors this would have been a career highlight, a bizarre journey into the depths of the heart, about letting go, forgiving and discovering love. while kafka on the shore can be dismissed as oedipus on drugs, it is much moer than that. it is dirty nirvana, it is beat poetry, it is the echoes of the heart.

however when compared with norwegian wood, or wind up bird, murakami disappoints us. yet, this is new direction, the reader has to admit to let go. to not question what he doesnt get, to follow murakami as he takes us through his metaphysical world, where nothing is as it seems yet all is resonant with our soul.

murakami's protagonists the 15 year old kafka and the older nakata are contrasting characters unified in their search for something elusive, but their paths criss-cross in inexplicable ways. the beauty of the novel lies in its wonderful prose, the translation is supreme and as usual murakami brings unique powers of observation in this heartbreakingly beautiful, erotic and weird novel.

This is a very good read - literature wise, that is. This is not something for everyone, especially those looking for a light read. I do think the book could have been about 100 pages less without damage being done, however. In any case, its writing style is excellent and the characters are developed to quite an extent. I like Mishima and Kawabata a bit more than Murakami, but that says nothing against Murakami - just a personal preference.

I did not like the Oshima character because this character just tends to have too much knowledge... a know-it-all of sorts. A character that seems to be there just to give the writer a method to lecture or to be a device for explanatory necessities. Oshima is annoying. The main character, Kafka, is 15 years old, but has more intellectual knowledge than most 25 year olds. I can accept a bright 15 year old, but this kid is beyond genius, and thus it is easy to forget, as you read, that he is 15.

The sexuality typical in Murakami is, again, present here. Which is fine if you are familiar with Murakami - after all, this novel is about an oedipal sort of tale.

I liked this one more than Norwegian Wood and I recommend it to anyone who can handle a lot of esoteric/psychology instead of an action/thriller plot.

This is my favorite book that I have read in several years. I truly stumbled on it by accident, as it was mentioned on a mailing list that I recieve, and was getting fantastic reviews. When I was at the library the next day, I saw the book in the "New Arrivals " section and took it home with me. Not long after I got home, I had fallen completely in love with the book, and shortly after finishing the book a few days later- I ordered a copy for my own library.

I am an avid reader, and "Kafka on the Shore" is much different than most books you'll find out there today. Murakami dances through the plot with a whimsical sense of mystery, and the book is a joy to read. The story follows two seperate plotlines, giving the most attention to a young runaway, Kafka, who follows his intuition to a town in Southern Japan. Kafka is charming, witty, and very intellegent. Throughout the story, he is wrestling with his own adolescence, and at the same time trying to figure out why strange things keep happening around him.

The second storyline in the novel is about an older and possibly autistic man named Nakata. He is a simple, but extraordinary man, and is without a doubt, the star of the book (and one of my all time favorite characters). Nakata is also following his intuition, and listening to the advice of various cats around the country, with whom he makes regular conversation.

The two storylines weave in and out, and play off of each other in a way that could only be done by a master storyteller. There are elements of the supernatural that eventually come into play, but the story never slips into silliness. Murakami's imagination is a fantastic place to play, and you'll love every minute that you spend there. And believe it or not, the very best parts of Kafka on the Shore, are the parts where Kafka is in the woods by himself, far apart from the rest of humanity. Something about the way that the author describes solitude, is just beautiful.

This the first book that I have read by the famed Japanese author, but it definately wont be the last. I cannot recommed this book enough.

On the advice of an author (her last name is `Hospital'). I started reading Haruki Murakami's novel "Kafka on the Shore." She had advised emerging writers to read book translations from languages other than English to experience different voice. I had not read any of the novels by this author.
The book began on a high note. A 15 year old school boy runs away from his house and travels to another city in Japan. He hated school. But I suddenly found another story starting in the next chapter. A group of school boys while collecting mushrooms in the forest lose consciousness for a while but then wake up fine. So I thought this book may have some element of science fiction. Or the author would come up with an explanation in some future chapter. But no explanation ever comes.
Then there is a third story of a cat talker. An old man dies in an apartment and a wriggling animal crawls out of his mouth. You never know what's the significance.
A ghost of a fifteen year old girl lives in the body of a 51 year old woman.
Two soldiers missing from World War 2 live in a forest without aging. In some other dimension there is a township inside a forest.
And there is some entrance stone which needed to be turned upside down.
Aren't all these things interesting? Reader continues to read because of the belief that issues will be connected and resolved in the end. And when it did not happen I felt cheated.(I finished this book to learn a valuable lesson of 'how not to write')
And you would think the three stories would merge in a coherent story at some point early in the book but doesn't occur till the end of the book.
This is a very poorly written book. Weren't there any editors to take a look at the prose before this book got published?
Let me go here one by one.
`I nodded' is a cliché. But is repeated so many (67 to be exact) times I got irritated. Another line in the dialogue repeated frequently is `Nakata is not very bright.' Well, readers are not suffering from dementia. Told once or twice, we would remember it, right? There is also a character that is shown to wear a Kunichi Football hat or take it off, all too often. It irritated me.
`Self-editing for Fiction Writers' says - And when you explain dialogue that needs no explanation, you're writing down to your readers, a surefire way to turn them off. There are many scattered examples of poor dialogue in this book. Here's an example:
`Yes, a little," Nakata replied.
"Impressive all the same," tabby commented.
""My name is Nakata," Nakata said, introducing himself. "And your name would be?"
"Ain't got one," the tabby said brusquely.
And the improbable Kafka and Oshima (the librarian), both school drop outs discuss the kind of philosophy that would put Socrates and Plato to shame. Part of the latter part of the book feels like a kind of encyclopedia of music.
Another repulsive piece of scene was when 15 year old Kafka asks a 51 year old woman to have sex with him (he knows she could be his mother) and she obliges him by getting laid at night.
I was put off by this novel. Is there a possibility that this author's other novels might be good? I won't dare to find out.

(***** = breathtaking, **** = excellent, *** = good, ** = flawed, * = bad)

A Japanese teenager flees his evil father and ends up far from Tokyo in a small southern town, hanging out at the Komura Memorial Library. He must sort out his oedipal destiny. Meanwhile, a Japanese oldster makes a parallel journey from Tokyo to the same town. A mysterious incident during WWII left him scatterbrained, but with the ability to speak with cats.

It just gets weirder and weirder from there. I enjoyed the old guy's story especially. Longer review available at ImpatientReader-dot-com.

Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore" goes beyond a typical coming of age story. Kafka Tamura is a young adult struggling to escape his father's oedipal prophecy and his mother's abandonment. His journey is paved by hardships, both internal and external, and his triumphs and failures are extremely powerful. In the five hundred pages of "Kafka" it is impossible not to develop an emotional connection with the protagonist. Although his life is hardly relatable, (having a father that eats cat hearts, falling in love with his mother) his intensity and raw emotion make his struggles feel like your own. Murakami crafts his characters with a delicacy that makes them feel real despite the book's unrealistic plot. The characters of "Kafka on the Shore" make the book extremely gripping, and Kafka's eventual success is deeply moving.
The only qualm I had about "Kafka on the Shore" was the style in which it is written. I am not too familiar with Japanese writing, or translations from Japanese to English, but the language felt a little too basic. The sentences often felt slightly empty, and the word choice felt too simplistic. I felt that there was a disconnect between the complex plot and characters, and the unsophisticated language. The simplistic prose of "Kafka on the Shore" seemed to muddy the intricacy of the story.

I am not quite to the end of this amazing novel -- so surreal and yet so emotionally real -- and I can't wait to see what happens. I also wondered about the translation -- how much is Americanized for our benefit, and if it's not then is it even more dream-like in Japan? From Colonel Sanders to eggs for breakfast, and all the musical references -- Prince? A thoroughly modern book with historical context, Kafka on the Shore captured my attention completely. Don't worry about "getting it" and just go along for the ride. What a story!

If you don't like avant-garde-ish stuff, don't read this book. If you think postmodernism is of the Devil (or just very lazy messed-up minds), don't even bother opening this book. If you think philosophy is a waste of time, don't even go near Murakami.

Because he has characters quoting things like:

"The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory." (Henri Bergson)

"At the same time that 'I' am the content of a relation, 'I' am also that which does the relating." (Hegel). The girl proceeds to expound the phrase: "Hegel believed that a person is not merely conscious of self and object as separate entities, but through the projection of the self via the mediation of the object is volitionally able to gain a deeper understanding of the self. All of which constitutes self-consciousness."

A page later, a guy who's the embodiment of Colonel Sanders (a'la KFC) chides a truck-driver:

"A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that observes to reason that acts. That's what's critical. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about, you gold-plated whale of a dunce?"

Now get this. The Bergson and Hegel quotes/remarks are smack in the middle of a love scene and made by a college girl prostituting herself for tuition money. Her client was the truck-driver. Colonel Sanders was the pimp.

I'll be honest: I DIDN'T 'GET' THIS BOOK! I'm not aware of any conventional-sounding reason for Murakami writing this. Like sound bytes which sound good (if a little awkward), it's like one big collection of provocations, 'mysteries', pseudo-connections - and just too bad for coherency.

I enjoyed SOME parts of it and Murakami has a way of drawing you in, enticing you to read more. But in the end, I'll be honest, I felt a little cheated. I felt like that whale cum dunce. And I likely won't think of KFC the same way again.

I am a fan of Murakami and I read already most of his novels. I liked Kafka on the shore. It took me on its waves on a fantastic magic ride and lead me to a safe shore in the end. I agree that sometimes in this novel, Murakami gets carried away with his imagination (ex. the personnages of Johnie Walker and the KFC colonel were a little too much for me :-)) but in a whole reading it was a intellectual and spiritual pleasure.However, I want to point out the surprising didactic aspect of the novel. Maybe because it deals with a 15 years old boy it has many didactic messages along with the plot. Like the discipline and gym exercises that Tamura does, his reading and music tastes also the other characters have a lot of didactic sayings - I did not mind that but I wonder if it was done intentionally (maybe there was a request of the education ministry to write an educating novel for young generation :-)) - there is a lot more to talk about this novel but that needs a lot of time and space (a reading club maybe) so in the meantime I wish Murakami to keep on his wonderful work because I enjoy a lot reading it.

Mary B. Bloom

this is the first murakami book i read, so keep that in mind.

to oversimplify my opinion of this book is done so i do not give too much away- having prefaced it like that...

if you liked "the master and margerita" by bulgakov and novels by angela carter, you might just love reading this account of young kafka tamura as he runs away from home. threaded with fantastical accounts of thouroughly animated characters' interactions and peppered with emotional discoveries i loved this book and want to read it again.

hope you enjoy!

According to R. Jackson (a theorist of fantasy literature), fantasy literature frequently features a phenomenon of psychological regression, where blurred becomes differentiation between objects, or time frames or spaces. In this novel, Kafka On the Shore, this may be happening literally. The adolescent boy, Kafka, undergoes the Oedipus Complex, which must have occured to his infancy, and Nakata is reduced to the mental stage, in which he cannot communicate with others properly as fit for adults, whether intellectually or emotionally. Especially, the character of Nakata is very attractive. His intellectual capacity may be that of a child, but only he knows what to do and how to do it to save the world, though the practical task of saving it is accomplished by his disciple (a truck driver, what was his name?). So the "child"-like Nakata is the real hero who saves the world. Does Haruki want to say (the source of) salvation lies in childhood? Like the poet Wordsworth or Jesus said? Wasn't Nakata a carpenter (if my memory is correct) like Jesus? Or are all these random associations just a bunch of baloney?

The mysteries of life an Oedipal enigma set in modern day Japan between WWII and the end of the century bringing out all the possible angles and the human struggles with reality and destiny a real master piece!
Again hard to put down!

This is my first Murakami book. Prior to reading Kafka on the Shore, i was told that he has written better books. Obviously, I have nothing to measure it against but I must say that if this is not his best book, I'm definitely in for a treat when I read his earlier ones.

Parallels between the two journeys or stories of Kafka Tamura and Mr. Nakata are underscored on several occasions. Actions in one story always affect the other and such a plot structure invariably compels the reader to draw intersections of the two stories on his or oher own. This, i would say, accounts greatly for the intrigue or addictiveness of the novel as it engages us and forces us to accept such dreamlike-ness as perfectly plausible. Given the title, I guess one can say anything less than such bizarreness would be a great disappointment.

The fact that many parts are left unexplained towards the end also compound the bizarreness. Either Murakami has ran out of steam here or simply refuses to tie the plot neatly together. Personally, i'm inclined towards the former cos I think a much better crafted plot (even when that stresses on uncertainty) would at least leave one with some suggestions to ponder over.

Overall though, the book is compelling and entertaining. Characterization, for one, is intriguing, especially because of the hermaphrodite, Oshima. In him/her, i think the novel seeks to epitomize the essence of its plot--the overwhelming uncertainties, and blurring and impossibility of distinctions or dichotomies in the current world; life is but a dream. Also, I wonder if the constant references to past, memories and war are a nod to the impact of Japan's militaristic past. In any case, this is a book i would recommend to friends. Definitely an interesting read.

I have to agree with the other reviewers. This is not the best Murakami to start with if you are unfamiliar with his work. Try The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles instead if you are a Murakami newbie.

That said, this novel is still absorbing and amazingly written. Who, but the great Haruki Murakami, could make a pimp named Colonel Sanders, fish falling from the sky, a woman who is a ghost of herself, all work as plot elements?

My biggest problem with this novel was the ending. It was ultimately unsatisfying. There were too many loose ends. Without spoiling the ending, the story of the killing wasn't really resolved and I still wasn't clear on exactly what happened.

This is a good choice for Murakami fans, but again, try The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles if you are still among the SADLY uninitated!

I would agree with other Murakami fans that this was perhaps not his finest novel. However, his amazing storytelling ability shines in various moments of this novel and it is the choices that his characters make that continue to fascinate me.

A previous novel, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, his main character interacts with a librarian and makes a certain choice. Here, too, Kafka deals with a librarian and makes a choice.

Although I think that Hard Boiled Wonderland is the superior novel, this novel is a compelling look at the same type of story with a different choice.

I continue to be impressed with Murakami's ability to take large chances in his novels with ridiculous ideas and somehow make them plausible and completely rational in the scope of the larger story.

He is still at the top of his game, but perhaps this novel is revisiting some concepts that he has previously written about.

I would agree that some of the mystery seems removed from this novel, perhaps because it is examining similar questions again from a new perspective.

I think that this novel is for the patient Murakami fan that is willing to look past some of this. It may not be his best novel, but he takes more chances than many and somehow pulls it off.

In alluding to the Western pioneer of subconscious fiction, its title prepares us for a strange ride. And so it is not wholly unexpected when early in Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, US Army intelligence officers probe Japanese witnesses to uncover the cause of a strange phenomenon. On a certain day during the Second World War, schoolchildren hiking in a forest fell en masse into a deep sleep, according to those familiar with the case. As the children begin to snap out of their trance-like states some few hours later, a boy named Nakata remains unconscious, his eyes open and slowly moving from side to side. Exceptionally, when he does awaken weeks later, his memory has been wiped clean. Commenting on the amnesia which has befallen Nakata, a psychiatric expert introduces the American interviewer to the concept of "spirit projection."

"Japanese folktales are full of this sort of thing, where the soul temporarily leaves the body and goes off a great distance to take care of some vital task and then returns to reunite with the body." The conceit turns out to be central to both of the novel's storylines: that of Nakata, who rejoins the world in a dimmed state to carve furniture and catch cats in his neighborhood of Tokyo; and that of Kafka Tamura, a 15 year-old runaway searching for his mother and sister. The flight of souls from life to what's after, from present to past, and from person to person make for a sometimes jumbled airspace, but, invariably, the greater challenge to connecting the dots of Kafka On the Shore's storyline lies in actually putting the book down.

Kafka's story begins as his fifteenth birthday ushers in "the ideal age to run away". Kafka admonishes himself, "From now on--no matter what--you've got to be the world's toughest fifteen-year-old. That's the only way you're going to survive. And in order to do that, you've got to figure out what it means to be tough." Humorously, Kafka's version of a tough runaway "roughs it" at a second-tier business hotel, eating at modest sit-down restaurants, after daily gym sessions. Clearly, Kafka's trials are psychic, his toughness required to deal with the Oedipal curse put on him by his father, an appreciated sculptor. On the night his famous dad turns up murdered, Kafka wakes up soaked in someone else's blood. But his innocence is assured--he is halfway across the country when the incident occurs.

Or so it seems until Kafka's friend Oshima, a librarian who gradually becomes more involved in his life, advances an explanation having to do with "living spirits". "That kind of thing appears a lot in Japanese literature" he notes. The Tale of Genji, for instance, is filled with living spirits. In the Heian period--or at least in its psychological realm--on occasion people could become living spirits and travel through space to carry out whatever desires they had."

So as police hunt for Kafka, the young man is ushered into hiding by Oshima, whose secluded cabin lies deep in the wooded mountains of Japan. In the mountain scenes, Murakami excels in creating another, darker world. Here we find nestled a guarded temple that provides shelter to the spirits of the living. Bounds of reality are constantly challenged in the novel, both in its manner of story-telling, and in its characters, who are so often special cases. When Oshima, a strong-willed intellectual, is taken to task for his sexist opinions, he rebuffs the charge, revealing himself as a hermaphrodite. In a notably even-tempered tirade against "narrow minds devoid of imagination," Oshima asserts that "What I can't stand are hollow people."

The concept of hollow people, that is, people who are capable of being used as a vessel, is expanded in the book. When Kafka's father is murdered, he appears in the guise of an evil Johnny Walker, replete with top hat, cape, and knee boots. Out to steal the soul of various cats, Johnny Walker here encounters Nakata, who becomes entwined in Kafka's fate. The shifting identities of the book's characters and "spirit projections" create another plane for their interaction. The head librarian, a mother figure to Kafka, too seems to be a vessel for her own fifteen-year-old soul. Her intense relationship with her "son" occurs both in reality and in the temple of spirits. Though difficult to neatly summarize, Murakami enables the suspension of disbelief through a cleverly plotted storyline. The story's extra dimension creates a space in which contemporary conceptions of love are challenged.

Kafka on the Shore is also the name of a painting in the book. Its scene depicts a boy, alone on shore, watching a lover's boat move away to another island. Through such imagery, Murakami relates the sensation of being removed, taken away to a past life that is only accessible in dreams. The "spirit projection" may resist analysis, but it serves to state a physical longing, and readers will empathize enough to be swept along with the narrative. Though at instances we feel like Hansel and Gretel, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that have disappeared when we turn around, Murakami's rapid pacing, straightforward prose, and sense of humor make reading Kafka on the Shore a wholly pleasurable experience.

The brilliance in Kafka on the Shore is the author Haruki Murakami's ability to fully expound by story's end his answer to the question he poses at the start of the book: is life pure coincidence, or is there a greater force that causes lives to, sometimes unknowingly, parallel each other? The answer to this lies in the double-meanings and irony scattered throughout the novel, but I believe that Murakami's answer is not definite. By the conclusion, I feel Murakami wants to convey that although fate can sometimes determine the course of one's path in life, a human has the capacity to be able to distinguish when his/her life has fallen into the hands of fate, and when he/she can choose their direction in life individually. Furthermore, this philosophy is flexible and malleable enough to connect to readers, allowing each one to take from the story an even more personal meaning from this idea of parallelism and coincidence.

For the most part, I never read fantasy novels, and although the preternatural elements of this book, mostly found in parts of the story concerning the character of the elderly Nakata, were a pleasant shift from the realistic storylines in the novels I habitually read, I felt that the meanings of fate and choice behind them were significantly more powerful. However, these supernatural occurrences supplement the book precisely enough that they never seem too unreal to be acceptable in conjunction with the storyline of the novel, another great accomplishment on the author's part.

My only issue with this novel was the character of Kafka Tamura, the protagonist of the book. I felt that he acted too old for his age, passing the point of maturity, more towards the point of possessing unrealistic qualities of a boy that is only fifteen-years-old. Regardless, I was able to, upon finishing the book, appreciate the bildungsroman aspects of Kafka's story. I loved that Kafka's journey was more than just trying to find his place in the world, as is the journey of many protagonists of coming-of-age novels. Kafka also came to his own understanding of the concepts of coincidence and choice, a journey that people of all ages participate in, and a journey that the reader also takes with him, simply by reading the novel.

I ended Kafka on the Shore with a feeling of overall satisfaction, most likely attributed to having had all the double-meanings explained and parallel storylines of Kafka and Nakata finally converge. This story has a delicate balance of the imaginary and the real, and if you are not one for the chimerical novels of this world, then I suggest you give fantasy a second chance with this book.

I want to take issue with Zachary Hanson's (below) bombastic criticisms of this book.

"Maddeningly inexplicable plot elements tossed off that add up to little more than bizarre Oedipal wish fulfillment, soft-porn, macabre anime-style violence and fantasy sequences" is a terrible abstract. The sotry of Kafka Tamura is supposed echo the story of Oedipus. To try and use that as a reason why the book is not good is simply foolish.

Violence in this book is actually quite rare, and the sex scenes , while somewhat graphic, mirror those in other Murakami novels. They're c ertainly nothing offensive.

Also, I personally found the dialogue between Hoshimo and Nakata to be some of the most beautiful literary dialogue I've read in a long time. The quote used is taken out of context, and without a reference to the fact that one of the characters has the intelligence of a child, it may appear banal. On the contrary, the story of these two men actually surpasses in many ways the parallel story of Kafka Tamura.

This book, while not on par with the superb 'Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,' is a beautiful, well told story that will have you thinking about the control we have over our own lives.

If you've read Murakami before, you'll see much of the same symbolism, as well as repeated themes.

In any case you won't be disappointed.

Murakami knows not only how to tell a story well, but also to tell it in a unique, naturally flowing way that keeps you hooked from the first page to the last sentence. And there is always more to it, layers and layers of meanings that stir you inside.

I am really enjoying reading this novel. I haven't read any of Murakami's other novels, but this one is hard to put down. Murakami's writing, while not sophisticated or erudite, is forboding and always keeps you below the surface, wondering how the adventures of Kafka and Nakata will end up. While the plot twists are sometimes farcical, for example Johnnie Walker the cat-killer asking for death, Murakami is able to weave a tapestry of suspense and redemption that keeps the novel going and keeps it believable. Through Kafka, he creates a reality not unlike the metamorphosis, in which the whole world tilts on its side and nothing seems real anymore. The only negative aspect I've found is making Kafka and Oshima talk like university professors. They seem to be too young to engage in such intellectual dialogue. But it's a great read anyway.

grateful am i that we have Haruki Murakami in translation from this gifted Japanese writer.i am also grateful to have found out about him and to have read this book.noone i know has ever heard of him and that to me is a shame.this,my first experience with Murakami,is an experience to behold.the story involves a 15-year old runaway,an old non-intelligent man who has unusual gifts,talking cats,and a man who has a taste for...you're just going to have to read this book to find out more.brilliantly unusual this book is.i found it hard to put down and after reading it i know that i won't soon forget it.best book i've read since aleister crowley's "Diary of a Drug Fiend." i can't wait to read Murakami's other books,as i'm sure that someone that writes this good,won't disappoint.great book!

Mysterious and meandering, "Kafka on the Shore" pulls you from the first pages and takes you for a very unsettling ride. Haruki Murakami works his usual genius at creating characters with familiar and compelling conflicts, and effortlessly pulling the reader into the erotically charged setting of modern Japan. "Kafka" introduces some new elements in a focus on a rural landscape and some shocking and incomprehensible violence. In all, an excellent and challenging read that will take places you've never been before, and may not want to visit again.

I know that I tend to give good reviews to Murakami, but they are not unfounded. This is the 4th of his books that I have read, and each one is better than the one previously. Following his standard form of real character in supernatural situation, Murakami has created another story that leaves you wondering long after the book has been closed.

Kafka on the Shore is now in my top-5 of all-time list.

The brilliance of Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore appears to me more in what is unexplained than what is evident in the literal text. Although I am initially drawn to books that contain a rich and unique plot, a quality that Kafka displayed throughout the entire novel, I was actually more fascinated by the ever present notion that the story would ultimately reach a definite climax yet without truly knowing how it would attain this goal. The story is driven by surreal events, intentionally left unexplained such as the true cause behind the school children fainting or two characters ability to converse with cats. What compelled me to continue to read the book was Murakami's capacity to mislead the reader and never allow him to see how the story would conclude; yet despite the constant supply of metaphors, symbols, and stories I never lost sight of the plot nor misread the characters thoughts and feelings, a rare instance in a book such as this. Another aspect that drew me in was the author's occasional remarks directly to the reader through his characters. There are times when I was literally told over and over that the character Colonel Sanders was a concept, a narrative device of Murakami's that could address the reader himself. Most important to me as a reader however, is a story's ability to bring together all the details from throughout the novel and gave each a purpose in the conclusion, very much like how the "shot" in A Prayer for Owen Meany is ultimately the action that saves the children in Owen's dream. Kafka succeeds so well in this area that I feel compelled to read it again just to see how each piece fits into the conclusion.
Kafka in the Shore surpassed all my expectations and changed the way I read surreal books such as this; the characters were all unique and enjoyable to analyze and connect with, while the bizarre occurrences throughout the story made for a spectacular plot and leave plenty of room for interpretation. I look forward to an opportunity to discuss it with anyone I can and explore the deeper meanings and metaphors in this incredible story.

To begin with a major annoyance, the English translation by Prof. Philip Gabriel of Murakami Haruki's Kafka On the Shore has been excessively "britishized" for the first Vintage paperback edition. The result is a weird mixture of American syntax and style with British spelling, typography, and vocabulary (mobile phones, lorries, and torches abound). Alas, this mixture isn't just weird and off-putting: it's effectively out-pulling insofar as the translation's constant flow of linguistic inconsistencies pulls you right out of the story, time and again. It's a great example of what I've come to call the "Transparency With Birds" effect. Meanwhile, Vintage also issued Gabriel's original translation in a "reprint" paperback edition, so both that and the original hardcover edition are an option.

The story itself can wrap you up & take you away, but Kafka on the Shore is certainly not among Haruki's masterpieces. The story lines are excessively opaque and excessively predictable at the same time, the characters at once over- and underdeveloped, and the novel has a Stephen King-ish feeling about it (certain motifs, characters, modes of progression), but without King's knack for weaving even the most outlandish storylines into a gripping and satisfying solution. Not that Kafka On the Shore needed a solution, but it also lacks internal coherence. In the end, too many things and events have not been accounted for, neither in terms of a solution nor in terms of coherence. And certainly not in terms of development: especially Kafka Tamura, the principal character with first-person view (mostly), seems to have ended up right where he started, up to and including his fully intact alter ego that goes by the name of "Crow."

The story's development, like the characters', is designed to be labyrinthine---a recurrent motif---rather than linear. Only, it's more circular than labyrinthine, on balance. While both the phrases "wrong turns must be righted" and "wrong turns have been righted" turn up sufficiently often in the original paperback edition's 615 pages to suggest one must have missed some major plot point or other, it is close to impossible even after attempts at backtracking to pinpoint what wrong turns have been taken when by which characters, let alone righted. That's postmodern, alright. Speaking of which, there's also that typically postmodern mix of ancient archetypes and corporate conspiracy elements, complete with a more than decent load of learned detours into art & culture, but without the tightly controlled over-the-top playfulness of, like, John Barth's or Donald Barthelme's or Robert Coover's fiction. Plus, Murakami's use of feminist characters and corporate icons feels forced, heavy-handed, and artificial. At times, the heavy-handedness even affects his writing technique: the way two pseudo-feminist cardboard characters "function" to reveal important attributes of another important character's make-up (Oshima) borders on hack work.1

But still, Kafka on the Shore is a rich and gripping reading experience. It does expand one's understanding of the world, or at least one's repertoire of questions. But of weaknesses, alas, it has more than its fair share.

>> This review has been updated on Dec. 8, 2009. The updated review was originally published at my blog [...].

Murakami's ninth novel starts off with one foot set in a deep dream state. It is such a deep dream everything feels real. Even the emotions are real or perhaps stronger than real. Then, he leads the next step with a realistic, post-modern account of the "toughest fifteen year-old in the world," named Kafka Tamura, packing his backpack preparing to run away from home. Effortlessly taking us from dream world to contemporary reality, Murakami's bold, maverick story telling has no boundaries.

From there, the novel uses a captivating labyrinth of metaphors to achieve a greater poetic truth. The next character, Nakata, a sixty year-old man who because of some mysterious incident in his early child woke-up weeks later with no memories and illiterate a, tabula rasa. However, "... Nakata not so bright," finds he can communicate with cats. Nakata's unwittingly finds his fate and travels are intertwined in some phenomenal way with Kafka's Oedipal adventure. But Nakata's not a mere foil of a character. His endearing actions and dialogues combined with his vivid encounters, transcends his simpleton role and becomes more like Dostoevsky's Idiot. Murakami gets to the heart of his characters. Even the smallest of roles fill you with empathy.

His efficient style and compelling descriptions allow, with out hesitation, fantastic occurrences like fish rain from a clear sky to ghostly characters. He deftly uses incredible phenomena to describe a deeper truth. Character dressed like Johnny Walker, (I'm guessing the Black Label) World War II U.S. army reports, Colonel Sanders of KFC, articles in newspapers, and even Prince's Little Red Corvette are just some of his metaphorical arsenal. But it is not just these modern and pop culture constructs he uses so well to pull you tightly in to his universe.

Latter in the novel, Hoshino, Nakata's truck driving companion sits at a coffee shop and listens to Beethoven's Archduke Trio. We are not only vicariously given precious, historical knowledge of the work but also a spiritual understanding of the piece even if one never heard it before. Murakami is a true erudite. He uses his impressive knowledge of classic literature, music, history, philosophy, and mythology in both eastern and western vain in such a visceral style it gives greater understanding of the works themselves. The sexy, dream/spirit prostitute quoting Hegel is both appropriate and insightful. Murakami's clear and efficient style never talks over us but rather so clearly it is as if we are hearing him from within our head.

Kafka on the shore keeps you in a spell that is hard to break. Intellectually stimulating yet an effortless read. Murakami moves past Logic of the mind and in even beyond the past, present and future in to the illogical emotions and in to a metaphysical realm. Murakami makes this a true labyrinth as he eruditely writes:

"...Do you know where the idea of a labyrinth first came from?"
I shake my head.
"It was the ancient Mesopotamians. They pulled out animal intestines - sometimes human intestines, no doubt - and used the shape to predict the future. They admired the complex shape of the intestines. So the prototype for labyrinth is in a word, guts. Which means the principle for the labyrinth is inside you. And that correlates to the labyrinth outside..." (326 p.)

Murakami once more metaphorically pulls his guts out on his ninth novel. While it is up to the reader to divine their fate

I found this book to be a beautiful metaphor and symbol of the mind during meditation, conscientious and subconscious thoughts. The patterning of writing style and the imagery used is so beautiful and powerful. I found his clever way of integrating his own philosophical beliefs and ideas very stimulating and I often had to put down the book simply to contemplate the meanings to my own development. A really good book, I recommend to anyone looking to open their minds

I do enjoy Haruki Murakami. I am one who responded particularly well to "Dance! Dance! Dance!," "Wind-up Bird," and "Hard-Boiled Wonderland." I also never saw the appeal of "Norwegian Wood" nor "The Wild Sheep Chase." If you enjoyed either of those books, you might want to take my review with a grain of salt. If your tastes run in my same direction, then you might not even want to give this one a read (though an author's "failures" can bring us much insight into his work--if you truly love Murakami, you might enjoy the activity of asking yourself, why didn't this one work?)

Here were the good points of the novel: 1. a strong beginning, 2. sympathetic characters, 3. an eerie atmosphere on occasion constructed.

However, I felt this novel suffered severely from the lack of an uncanny energy that practically drives most of Murakami's works. Our author is remarkable at producing a strange and powerful sensation in the reader that everything that is happening is meant to happen, links up into some coherent whole, and is also eerily familiar. He does this in part through an everyman protagonist who is forced to undergo the bizarreness of supernatural events that resonate with a psychological reality. He clearly understands how to create an atmosphere of mystery and tension in many of his other novels: he rides the line beautifully between realistic and mundane descriptions and events, and the occasional moment of a breakthrough into another world--the other side. It happens when we least expect it, like self-insight.

In "Kafka", the characters are too certain about where they are going and what they are doing. The reader is alienated from them. They handle too perfectly the wierdness of the situation that surrounds them. Murakami sacrifices the uncanny and any real tension in order to produce characters who are "in control" (as another reviewer puts it). But what is so powerful about Murakami's writing is that he recognizes (usually) how nothing is truly within our power.

Also, he does not ride the balance all that well between normalcy (even mundanity) and the fantastic. He leaps into the fantastic without giving us sufficient build-up (except for the first several chapters, which are nice) or sufficient time to reflect upon what has occured.

And can anyone tell me what's with the gratuitous prostitute?

Murakami is one of our greatest living authors, and in my opinion this is his masterpiece. Kafka on the Shore is so beautiful and so surreal it will leave you haunted for days. The characters are so masterfully crafted that they will become a part of you. The existentialist themes are so profound that they will change you. This book is designed to make you think, and more importantly, to make you feel. And it does both those things, powerfully.

Please permit me to first state that I am true Murakami fan. I have found all of his works more than enjoyable, and wish that I could read "Wind Up Bird" and "Norwegian Wood" for the first time ad infinitum. This said, "Kafka on the Shore" was a bit of a disappointment, and yet it is still Murakami and therefore deserves four stars.

My general feeling about this book was that Murakami felt like he had not gotten his point across in his other works, and hence, wrote this story trying to reiterate all of his old themes into this new piece. Foremost, Murakami is obsessed with the idea that as we move through life we leave some that is essential to our being behind. We go through a process of recognizing this. This process is takes us on a journey that is very much like an absurd detective story to find what has been lost and eventually come to terms with it.

This is exactly what "Kafka on the Shore" does. It is a mix between "Wind Up Bird" (reference to wells and Japan's military past) and the "End of the World" portion of "Hardboiled Wonderland . . ." (shadows). Yet, the story does not leave the reader with the same sense of empathy for the protaganist that is so common across his other novels. For example, while "Dance Dance Dance" lacked the depth of other works, it was immensely entertaining and empathetic. This is "Kafka's" true downfall. Nevertheless, as the days have gone by since reading the story, the reader is still left with the contemplative sensation as with any of his other works.

Finally, I was a bit confused by his literary references. In the first half of story, Murakami's characters discuss important Japanese authors. Then he moves toward Greek mythology, and finally popular Western Music (leaving the Japanese behind). At first, I thought he was trying to make his novel truly Japanese to thwart criticism of being too Westernized. But, then he abandons the Japenese references altogether and moves completely to the West. Hmmm?

But, if you are a true Murakami fan, read "Kafka on the Shore". You may be a bit disappointment, but it's still Haruki. If you've never read him before, then, there's nothing to lose.

I've been going through as many reviews of this novel as I can find. None of them take this book as seriously as I do, for one reason or another. I believe that Kafka on the Shore deserves serious attention. John Updike's in the New Yorker conveys the same basic view of the theme that I would like to, presenting it as a novel about existence in general. Other reviews complain about loose ends, but acknowledge the novel's force with phrases like "sheer narrative punch." To me, though, Murakami pulled it off perfectly. In this novel, Murakami takes the courageous step of writing a book that is manifestly about the psyche. Some of its characters and conceits come directly out of Jungian psychology. It becomes a novel about integration of conciousness, and about how to live in an era that is to an extent aware of its own psyche. This is probably the most exciting book I've read from the last decade. It is also a lot of fun, and terribly beautiful in places. It moves through its surreal action with an admirable serenity. The writing is lucid, the dialogue memorable. Kafka on the Shore deserves to be read closely and remembered dearly.

This book is bizarre. All of Murakami's books have fantastical elements to it, but this one went above and beyond anything I've read of his other works. A head-spinning plot keeps the story going. I enjoyed the references to Japanese and Greek mythology and how they influenced the story.

As a cat lover, I found this book disturbing. After all, who is this Johnnie Walker fella who's hobby is to kill cats? Is he really Kafka's father? Anyone who loves Murakami knows that his tales are full of twists and turns, enigma and loose-ends. Kafka on the Shore is no exception. If you've not become a fan already, then you might be annoyed that there is no clear cut ending but if you're happy to go with the flow, to be swept along by a series of inventive characters then you will find this a compelling work.

But interestingly there is a way to unravel a little bit of the mystery.

It's worth knowing that the cat-killing sculptor is based on a real Johnnie Walke who lives in Tokyo. If you know the man, you can begin to understand the connections within the novel. And to do that, you could read (insiders tip here) pages 186-89 of Extremes: Contradictions in Contemporary Japan by G M Thomas. Walker is described here in some detail.

(And isn't this a literary first? For a real person to appear in a novel and a non-fiction book in the same year?)

But back to the book. There are the usual Murakami favourites like teenage sex but whilst this may not be one of his best it should none the less be read.

So, if you've never read Murakami, you may enjoy this this more thoroughly than I did. I liked this one, don't get me wrong, but it just uses the same old tricks. Here's your handy-dandy Murakami checklist:

1. Multiple story lines, seemingly unrelated at first. Here you have three, one of which--the army reports--resolves itself quickly; then you have the cat talker; finally, the runaway kid. For bonus points, we also have the WWII setting for one of the timelines, something HM loves, so, our first check for Kafka on the Shore!

2. Fantastical elements. This is the whole magic realism aspect essential to all Murakami. In this case we have a group of school kids blacking out, the cat finder/talker, and an apparently reincarnated love interest. Check number two.

3. Age-related taboo love story. Young teen and aging librarian--another check in HM style. More bonus points here for the gay/transsexual/asexual secondary character, although it serves little purpose here (seemingly sensational).

4. Completely unrealistic pseudo-philosophical dialogue that somehow still holds your interest (most of the time). KotS doesn't have quite the normal fill of the philosophy here, but, as always, we have plenty of dialogue that makes no attempt to mimic real life. Check.

5. Unnecessary attention paid to music, perhaps suggesting power of music as magical. You'll find it here in a song the librarian recorded as a romantic teen. Check five!

6. Russian literature cited on a regular basis? Well, only occasionally in this one, Chekov's maxim about a gun in a story means the gun has to be shot. Iffy check here.

7. Emphasis on the power of solitude and isolation. Yep, in this story we have a cabin completely cut off from civilization. Another tally.

8. Any discussion of Japanese campus protests of the 60s? Not central to the story, but Murakami got it in there with a sadly slain boyfriend's backstory, so check.

9. Protagonists who don't fit in, despite being seemingly revered by everyone in the narrative. Big check here--the boy is some sort of wallflower but still gets the ladies. The old man says he's not very smart, but he ends up with a religious-like disciple. Check.

10. Money, power, and fame all held in low regard. Yep, the librarian gave it all up at an early age, the boy drops out of school, the old man is taken care of by family and cat owners. Check!

11. Is the literary world involved? Yes, but not a writer this time, just people who live in a library and the completely illiterate foil cat talker.

12. Is perception of reality (or the question of objective reality(ies)) a central question? You bet, the unreliable narrator turns out to be reliable--at least in the case of the boy--but, no ultimate answer is attempted. Check.

13. Are the female characters especially poorly wrought and seem to only serve as romantic objects? God yes. Quite a bit of ink is spilled on the librarian's lost love (and, of course, this has destroyed her life and she waits to die subsequently) and despite that time devoted, I never found her in the least bit believable. ...and then there's the odd groping 20 year old girl who seems to have no purpose whatsoever... Double check.

Anyway, I could on, but I think I've either made my point or haven't by now. Murakami isn't a one trick pony, but he's also unlikely to shock you after you're read a couple of his.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed reading KotS, but it is formulaic. So, don't read it if it's the only Murakami you'll ever touch (Wind Up Bird, is his best for my money), but I don't see any reason to withhold a recommendation. Murakami is on the cusp of Nobel Laureate status for good reason; KotS is representative of a solid performance on his part.

This book has pleasantly surprised me. Murakami's writing is original and entertaining : quality literature and certainly not the everyday thriller novel that you can find by the dozens. Reality and fiction constantly mix to create a style full of metaphors and illusions. I certainly recommend this book, but at the same time I am not really tempted to go and read all of Murakami's other novels.

I just go with the weird and crazy. I read both Hard Boiled and 1Q84, so the plot wasn't something I wasn't prepared for. Murakami has a way with taking you on a surreal journey. This book is no different. Sexual awakening, purpose, and meaning. I liked this book. It spoke to me.

Kafka is a teenager who runs away from his single parent home. A simple premise, but the journey he takes is far from simple. He ends up holed up in a private library, then discovers he is not as alone as he thinks. A surreal trip out of day to day reality ends with Kafka coming to terms with himself and with the world. And don't forget the man who talks to cats and the Entrance Stone.

It's engaging, spellbinding and a delight to read. If you haven't read Murakami yet this is a great place to start - and then you're on a slippery slope to enjoying the rest of his works.

I tried to like this "insistently metaphysical mind-bender," as _The New Yorker_ blurb puts it on the back cover, but by the last half of the book I was constantly cursing the fact that I chose to read this 467-page bildungsroman. Murakami could've cut this by half and got the same thing across to us, whatever it is he is getting across. I was also pulled in by the title, Kafka being one of my heroes. Unlike Kafka, Murakami doesn't succeed in taking an ambling plot that seems to go nowhere and concomitantly help us dig down to the deeper level of things.

This isn't even worthy of a lot of other stuff that gets passed off as literature these days. This is metaphysics lite (with elementary Hegelian subject-object relations thrown in to no good end) with maddeningly inexplicable plot elements tossed off that add up to little more than bizarre Oedipal wish fulfillment, soft-porn, macabre anime-style violence and fantasy sequences. In short, this is fantasy for older teen males that tries to pass itself off as literature. A 19-year-old would get more metaphysical bang for his buck from Hesse, but then again he wouldn't get the prurient sex scenes and weird occurrences that take the plot nowhere.

All of this I could maybe handle if the writing weren't so awful in spots. There are two plots here, Kafka Tamura's bildungsroman (which generates the most interest of the two plots, but is still EXTREMELY hard to swallow in certain key spots, which I won't give away since they are the "surprise" elements of this novel) and Nakata's search for the "entrance stone." Nakata is an old man who can't spell, read, feel passion, remember anything and who is therefore very "simple," as he says over and over. He hooks up with Hoshino, your everyman who drives truck and who loves baseball. You would expect dialogue between two simpletons to be wooden, but I think we can be spared almost a hundred pages of this dialogue. On his "metaphysical" journey with Nakata, Hoshino learns the value of culture, specifically Beethoven. Problem is, I don't care. Here's a sampling of the kind of writing that abounds in _Kafka_:

"Driving back to the apartment, Hoshino stopped at a bookstore and picked up maps of Takamatsu city and the Shikoku highway system. He popped into a CD shop nearby to see if they had a copy of Beethoven's _Archduke_ Trio, but the little shop had only a small clasical section and one cheap, discount-bin version of the piece [. . .] but Hoshino went ahead and paid his eight dollars.

"Back in the apartment, a soothing fragrance filled the place. Nakata was bustling around the kitchen preparing some steamed daikon and deep-fried flat tofu. 'I had nothing to do, so I made a few dishes,' he explained.

"'That's great,' Hoshino said. 'I've been eating out too much these days, and it'll be nice to have a home-cooked meal for a change. Oh, hey--I got the car. It's parked outside. Do you need it right away?'

"'No, tomorrow would be fine. Nakata has to talk more with the stone today.'

"'Good idea. Talking things over is important [. . .]."

And on and on and on. I think Murakami could've done something with all this strangeness if he would've went for quality over quantity, but he chose to serve us dialogue that tells the plot rather than shows us something prescient, like so many pulp sci-fi novels. It's mostly just weirdness for the sake of wonder, which can be great in the hands of a sensitive writer (read: the language has to provide the wonder, not gratuitous event-mongering). The problem is that Murakami really gives us next to nothing to wonder about despite the great lengths he appears to take.

I cannot recall the last time when so little was demanded of me through out the course of a novel. I have read a handful of Murakami's novel and for the most part they were thoroughly enjoyed. And I must say that Kafka started off in very much the same vein- typiocal hooky Murakami enroute to an obvious existential awakening. Beat the horse to death and then beat it some more just to make sure! Turning a corner? Where? Into a supposed transcendence of the surreal and the metaphysical? Does that make one an above average spinner of yarns? This is Murakami once again presenting us with his typical portrayal of benign and inconsequential'characters'. The only true character in the entire story being Nakata. I kept thinking as I got into the second half of the novel, 'Is he really so blatantly obvious with everything, not leaving an ounce of subtlety for us to decipher and play with?' He leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination! He fails to create this 'dream-like' prose of of a story that I so often hear levied against this novel. The only scene that gets to within grasping distance of such a realm of writing would be the 'Johnny Walker' scene that is referenced throughout several of these reviews. Other than that, the rest is almost medicinally sterile, not to mention largely predictable. I don't necessarily have an issue with that of the predictable when it is done well and has something worthwhile to say. Murakami evolving? More like Murakami stagnating into a bit of long-winded atrophy. He merely placed a piece of parsley on the plate that is easily side-swiped into the garbage with the rest of the rubbish. If you want to read Murakami, I kindly recommend Sputnik Sweetheart. This is merely my impressions and tastes...to each his or her own.

I really liked the first half of this book. In the second half, it got needlessly weird, characters went away and/or completely changed personality for no good reason, and it just plain got difficult to WANT to read it. Don't get me wrong, I got completely wrapped up in the story--which is why I think I'm disappointed with it. In a trend common to today's writers, the ending is vague and doesn't wrap up all the loose ends--obviously the author hoping for a sequel--and the proverbial gun in the story never seems to be fired. (A common quote actually USED in the book, "If there's a gun, eventually it will be fired." Let's just say there's a whole, metaphorical, non-loaded arsenal here.) It's a good read, but not worth a re-read...and the ending is disappointing.

This was my second Murakami book, after The Wind up Bird Chronicles- which I really liked. Kafka on the Shore was a good read, but I didn't love it. I kept waiting for it to get better, but it stayed a constant "good"...i'd recommend this book though, as it was pretty enjoyable. There are multiple story-lines going on in this book, which are all related in some way. I liked this aspect because it made the book more interesting and had me constantly turning the pages.

Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore is wonderful. It has a dream-like quality, a sort of surreal sensibility that will transport you to another dimension. The story of a young runaway, Kafka, who is in search of his missing mother and sister, is entrancing. This novel is not for everyone. It's weird--but I found it wonderful in its weirdness. It is one, big existential dream. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: I love Murakami and have read every novel he's written outside of "Pinball."

That said, I found "Kafka" his least impressive work by a wide margin. Some of this, I am convinced, is due to the translation, which is not only uninspired but in many places downright sloppy. There's far too much "says-ing", "was-ing" and general verbal passivitiy in the book. (At this point I think it's only fair to give some credit for the sheer magic and lyric power of 'Wind-Up Bird' to Jay Rubin, who somehow seems to translate a different Murakami than either Gabriel or Birnbaum.)

As for the work itself...I don't know. I see that a lot of people really enjoyed it. I found the philosophy boring, the plot plodding, and the characters very poorly sketched. In the way that a true Gus Van Zandt fanatic can derive pleasure from watching "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues," I enjoyed reading this book, but it did not have anywhere near the same kind of effect on me as his others have. I felt like I was struggling to hear the voice of the writer I know and love beneath a screeching jumble of white noise.

As my first Murakami novel, I didnt quite know what to expect....

but it truly was a good novel, at times i found myself rivited... at other times i felt like i was reading a... little too much philosphy that had nothing to do with the story. I really like Oshima, but i felt like that was his main reason for being there. To talk about philosphy. The ending also left a little to be desired... but wow look at all the negatives ive said!!

THIS WAS a great novel, incredibly well written, much deeper that the average novel and therefore more worthwhile to read. Beautifully written. Check it out!

Between shifting plot lines and interesting characters, I found this book very entertaining. I didn't give it a 5-star rating simply because the ending left me feeling a little out of touch. While I know this is common for Murakami novels (from the 6 or so that I have read), I still found the message behind the ending a little opaque and it left me feeling a tad empty (or perhaps that was the point in the first place). Aside from the ending, I really liked the book as a whole and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys Murakami's strange stories and unique delivery.

As a fan of the Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Murakami's Kafka on the Shore provides a surrealistic trip, and an even bigger treat to fans of his previous books. With memorable characters, original story, and Murakami's unorthodox prose and style, Kafka on the Shore is an unforgettable book. Throwing musical, social, and cultural references around, Kafka has an immediate feeling, and makes it seem all the more relevant. Comparing the book to Murakami's masterpiece Wind-up Bird Chronicle is bound to happen, and as a fan I'd have to say I enjoyed both equally.

This is a stylish and compelling thriller full of mythic symbolism, classical music and talking cats. Our 15 year old hero runs away from home and across Japan with nothing but a backpack full of emotional baggage and an Oedipal complex that would kill a horse. His coming of age, living in a small library, triggers a psychological fantasy where memory, desire and reality battle it out. This novel is quite creepy in parts but unputdownable. It's like a Stephen King novel produced by Studio Ghibli. A mesmerising ride.

Murakami delivers one of his most poetic, enigmatic novels yet. A 15 year old boy, alienated from a distant but brilliant father; an idiot savant victim of WWII gassing on a mission to complete a dangerous spiritual mission; a mysterious library locked in time & home to a beautiful heartbroken woman - all are interwoven in a tale that is at once lyrical & mysterious. Be prepared for talking cats, a wicked Johnny Walker Red character & the benevolent appearance of Colonel Sanders as a pimp to round out your journey. Oh, and a visit to limbo, too. How all of this ties together is the beauty of Murakami. This book is beautiful, haunting & quite lovely.