Product Description

The most eagerly awaited Murakami novel yet. Already a massive best-seller in Japan

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #741 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Stuart Jeffries, Guardian
'I've never read a novel that I found so compelling because of its narrative inventiveness and love of storytelling...great entertainment'.

The Book Magazine
`truly staggering'

Synopsis
"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 new novel is at once a classic tale of 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.

Customer Reviews

One of the Best Novels of 2005
"Kafka on the Shore" richly deserves its praise by The New York Times as one of its most notable books of fiction in 2005. On a more personal note, I regard it as the most compelling new work of fiction I have read this year, and substantially more absorbing a read than the novel which I regard now as a distant Number Two, Rick Moody's "The Diviners". But I do wonder whether it is truly one of Haruki Murakami's masterpieces; of these both "Norwegian Wood" and "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles" are genuine literary classics of modern world literature. In stark contrast, I agree with a previous Amazon reviewer that the Kafka Tamura saga - one of the two intertwined plots - is reminiscent of "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World". And yet here, unlike in the earlier novel, Murakami seems fascinated in seeing Kafka's strange odyssey via the eyes of a 15 year-old teenager, not a thirty-something adult Japanese male.

"Kafka on the Shore" is an epic, modern near classic devoted to the themes of loneliness, love and longing. While Kafka Tamura's odyssey for a mysterious mother and older sister who vanished when he was four is quite compelling in its own right, this plot is occasionally overshadowed by the bizarre saga of the geriatric simpleton Nakata, the mysterious survivor of a bizarre World War II episode in his childhood, and somone who has a most unusual rapport with cats. Indeed, Nakata, in many respects, may be the novel's true emotional core and truly one of the most compelling, original characters ever created by Murakami. Their separate quests will lead them from Tokyo to the distant Japanese town of Takamatsu, and involve not only love, but murder most foul, and strange events such as a rain of sardines falling from the sky. With "Kafka on the Shore", Haruki Murakami reaffirms his position as Japan's most important contemporary novelist, and one of our great writers of modern contemporary fiction.

kAFKA ON THE SHORE
This is a fantastic book, mysterious, cunning and ruthless. The style of writing is beautiful. There have not been many books i have read that have kept me up till 4 am and made me late for work.

Good book, bad voice acting
I'd give the story itself 4/5 stars but as this is an audio book, the narrators are also being reviewed. First off I'm English, not American, but despite this I still found the American accent on this audio book probably the worst fake accent I've ever heard, it's like the voice actor was taking revenge for Dick Van Dyke in 'Mary Poppins'. It really ruined half the story for me.