Kafka on the Shore

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Murakami, Haruki	4-week checkout	Due 05-13-2024

With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come. This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle-yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own. Extravagant in its accomplishment, Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world's truly great storytellers at the height of his powers.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

More surreallism from Murakami submitted by marielle on June 25, 2011, 8:41pm A teenage boy runs away from home and spends day after day in a library. A mentally deficient man communicates with cats. What do they have in common? The threads of fate.

I enjoyed this book, perhaps not as well not as well as <a href="http://www.aadl.org/catalog/record/1213993"><i>The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</i></a>. They are similar thematically, although this book has a more literary bent; there are lots of references to classical Greek literature, and obviously more contemporary works as well, as you can probably tell from the title. Definitely worth reading if you're interested in Japan, talking cats, surrealist literature, or references to classical literature.

Magic realism dream submitted by emaelshaikh on August 31, 2016, 12:36pm Dreamlike, bizarre story that pulls you in and never lets go.

too weird for me submitted by apknapp on August 17, 2020, 12:52pm I only got just past the halfway point and had to quit. The writing was quite good and the main character was intriguing, but I kept wanting the various threads to gel into one cohesive story and that kept not happening. At least one of those threads is crazypants wacky, with one guy talking to cats (yes, the cats talk back) and another, possibly mythological guy torturing cats. So...that's about where I decided the good had been defeated by the weird.

Very Surreal submitted by KatieD on August 5, 2021, 1:02pm I didn't know what to expect when reading this book. I'm glad I read it and completed it, but there are still parts that I don't understand. There were also some parts that I just wasn't comfortable with.

Dark and beautiful submitted by courtneyhooper on August 12, 2022, 11:48pm It never all makes sense to me, but I love it all the same

That's Murakami for ya submitted by mattchell on June 24, 2023, 2:44pm The weaving of intricate characters, magical and unknowable beings, media references, and the dark depths of the human psyche make it easy to lose your self in the story. If you enjoyed The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, this is a must for you. I just wish I could figure out what it all meant.

Don't judge a book by its cover submitted by akrrr08 on August 1, 2023, 11:52pm Especially this one. Magical read!