Haruki Murakami

this started out pretty good and then got progressively weirder, which was hard for me. but it was still interesting. i'm not sure i take much from it or could even say much about what it's about but it was still okay and makes me more willing to read others by him. (was not impressed by the sex scenes, though, or many of the strange discussions. really once this got going, i wasn't much into the writing style either, but it wasn't hard to read or a slog, just not anything special. the story was strange enough, while not being too strange, to pull me along. until toward the end when i was already invested enough, and then it got quite strange, which i suppose he's sort of known for.) thematically i think this wasn't for me, especially the oedipal stuff and how i felt like he was stretching to make that story fit, but other parts of this were nice.

"'...reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life.'"… (more)

Kafka Tamura is a fifteen-year-old boy who has run away from his Tokyo home to flee his emotionally abusive father. Having been abandoned by his mother and older sister when he was a small boy, Kafka sets off on an ill-defined and poorly planned quest to recapture the family life he never really had and to escape the modified Oedipal curse his father has placed on him (i.e., Kafka is destined to kill his father and sleep with both his mother and his sister). Satoru Nakata is an elderly man also in search of something he does not fully understand. After an unexplained illness suffered in childhood leaves him intellectually impaired and with no memories—but with the ability to speak to cats—Nakata has spent his life as a ward of the state, but now senses that he is destined for another purpose. After a violent event causes him to leave Tokyo as well, Nakata’s journey takes him to the same town in the south of Japan where Kafka is now hiding from the law. How—and why—will the paths of these two men intersect?

In Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami has created this inventive coming-of-age tale, which is at once intellectually challenging and fully engaging at every turn of its serpentine plot. The main challenge for the reader is that the story is told in a magical realism style where myriad bizarre things occur: memories and dreams become real, fish rain down from the sky, evil spirits take the form of famous corporate symbols (e.g., Johnnie Walker, Colonel Sanders), soldiers from World War II wander a lost forest for sixty years without aging, ghosts of still-living characters appear randomly. However, this all makes sense in the end as the major conflicts are resolved in an emotionally fulfilling manner. The narrative is greatly enhanced by an interesting stylistic choice in which the main characters’ stories are developed in alternating chapters—Kafka’s written in the first-person present, Nakata’s in the third-person past—which allows them to eventually converge smoothly from very different starting points and perspectives.

I really enjoyed reading this novel, as I have everything I have come across from this remarkable author. Murakami is an imaginative and truly gifted storyteller and the facile way in which he integrates such fantastical elements into the mix is quite impressive. Magical realism is a difficult style to pull off convincingly but, like other modern masters of that tricky genre (e.g., Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie), he does so here skillfully. I also admire the clear love and compassion that Murakami has for his characters, who are fully realized creations that the reader comes to care about quite a lot. Impressively, that care is evident not only in how the main characters were created, but in the development of the impressive and memorable supporting cast as well, including Miss Saeki, Oshima, Sakura, Hoshino, and a host of cats, all of whom play pivotal roles in how the narrative unfolds. This was a captivating and extremely satisfying book to read and the story is not one that I will soon forget.… (more)