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Kafka on the Shore | 
 enlarge | Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $7.94
You Save: $7.01 (47%)
New (43) Used (33) Collectible (3) from $7.17
Rating:  182 reviews
Sales Rank: 8834
Media: Paperback
Pages: 480
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 1400079276
Dewey Decimal Number: 895.635
EAN: 9781400079278
ASIN: 1400079276
Publication Date: January 3, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
The opening pages of a Haruki Murakami novel can be like the view out an airplane window onto tarmac. But at some point between page three and fifteen--it's page thirteen in Kafka On The Shore--the deceptively placid narrative lifts off, and you find yourself breaking through clouds at a tilt, no longer certain where the plane is headed or if the laws of flight even apply. Joining the rich literature of runaways, Kafka On The Shore follows the solitary, self-disciplined schoolboy Kafka Tamura as he hops a bus from Tokyo to the randomly chosen town of Takamatsu, reminding himself at each step that he has to be "the world s toughest fifteen-year-old." He finds a secluded private library in which to spend his days--continuing his impressive self-education--and is befriended by a clerk and the mysteriously remote head librarian, Miss Saeki, whom he fantasizes may be his long-lost mother. Meanwhile, in a second, wilder narrative spiral, an elderly Tokyo man named Nakata veers from his calm routine by murdering a stranger. An unforgettable character, beautifully delineated by Murakami, Nakata can speak with cats but cannot read or write, nor explain the forces drawing him toward Takamatsu and the other characters. To say that the fantastic elements of Kafka On The Shore are complicated and never fully resolved is not to suggest that the novel fails. Although it may not live up to Murakami's masterful The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Nakata and Kafka's fates keep the reader enthralled to the final pages, and few will complain about the loose threads at the end. --Regina Marler
Product Description
Kafka on the Shore is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom.
As their paths converge, and the reasons for that convergence become clear, Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder. Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s great storytellers at the peak of his powers.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 177 more reviews...
 Nobody I Know Likes This Book December 26, 2008
Wilbur Hoflich (Singapore)
I'm surprised to see this book get high scores here, it's quite bad even by Murakami Haruki's relatively low standards ("Norwegian Wood" and "A Wild Sheep's Chase" and "Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" are good, the rest are enjoyable as contentless vehicles of style only). Everyone I know who's read "Kafka on the Shore" thought it was pointless rubbish.
Murakami Haruki seems to be very famous in the US, and he publishes rubbish short stories like "A Shinagawa Monkey" in the New Yorker as a result, but when he puts out books like "Kafka on the Shore" I get a bit frustrated. He has great books, but this one just takes his more experimental pieces like "Dance Dance Dance" and goes through the motions for a couple hundred pages. Very silly, irrelevant stuff. A truck driver in the movie picks up a hitchhiker and drives him to Shikoku where things seem to be happening. He gains an appreciation of classical music, he picks up a heavy rock, he has fantastic sex with a callgirl (who happens to be a philosophy major in college by day!) pimped to him by Colonel Sanders (yes, that's right - the guy in the white suit). He's a minor character in the story, but it doesn't matter - the tale says nothing about nothing. At least it's technically well written, and I've been able to remember this much about its annoying details several months after finishing the book, but that's probably no big compliment...
 hypnotic November 22, 2008
J. Simon
Kafka on the Shore is a dream voyage to another land that is nevertheless familiar. It is gentle, violent, abrupt and entrancing. Murakami's worlds take you through the Looking Glass. Sometimes, the world you enter seems strange, disconnected and totally unrelated. But at other times, you feel like you've been offered a glimpse of your personal space of awareness that is typically hidden, but now, suddenly revealed. This novel feels like an invitation to revelation and the unknown. It is brisk, awakening, and warm. Totally unique.
Great fiction from a master of the surreal November 18, 2008
Simone Oltolina (Morbio Inferiore, TI Switzerland)
'Kafka on the Shore' is yet another great Murakami novel. I'd say people will either love it or find it annoying depending on what's their take on Murakami's highly recognizable style: first of all, Murakami writes surreal fiction, being often tagged as the literary equivalent of David Lynch. Not everyhting makes senses, many things are left unexplained and there are always passages that are more 'atmospheric' than related to an actual plot.
Secondly, there is always a great deal of (quintessentially japanese) orderileness in the way most characters behave. The way they prepare their lunch, pack their goods before leaving to somewhere...it is always described in a very methodical way which I find profoundly soothing. So you get this contrast between the surreal vibe of the narration and the extremely composed way most characters go through their daily routines. In this novel, this is best exemplified by Nakata, an old man who can prophesy the future and do extraordinary things but leads an otherwise simple and unassuming life.
'Kafka on the shore' presents two main storylines, narrated in alternating chapters and somehow joining around the end: one chronicles the oedipal quest of a 15-years old runaway, who might have killed his father and slept with both his mother and sister. All of this is left unclear. Is it real? is it a make-believ fantasy? Is 'the boy named Crow' Kafka's superego or something else entirely? Don't look for answers because you won't find any, just like in a Lynch's movie, everyhting is alternatively dreamy or eerie with the contours always blurry.
The second storyline follows Mr. Nakata (actually everything begins with some X-files from the Second World War...), victim of a mysterious accident who left him 'not really bright'. This man, accompanied in his odissey by a drop-out trucker, doesn't know much about what he's doing, but is pushed forward in his travels by a mysterious force, amidst magic entrance stones, entities who take the form of several famous advertising characters, talking cats and leeches raining from the sky.
All in all, Murakami is an acquired taste and, as such, may well polarize judgments but if you care for imaginative fiction and can accept a storyline that doesn't explain everyhting, then this novel is definitely a must.
yes to Kafka October 25, 2008
Many thought provoking references and as much symbology. A little transparent but exciting and enjoyable.
Weird is what you pay for... October 24, 2008
Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
... and weird is what you get, with Haruki Murakami. But this novel is not merely full-blown weird; it' s about the meaning of Weird, not just in the modern sense of 'bizarre' but in the root sense also. 'Weird' is an Old Norse word meaning something like "the uncanny ability to influence Fate." The root of the word "will" has the opposite meaning: "the canny ability to resist Fate." While I doubt that Murakami had any reference to old Norse cosmogony in mind, this novel Kafka on the Shore can be read as a contest between Weird and Will, as they relate to Fate.
But don't think it's not 'weird' in the contemporary sense also! Any novel where cats talk, ghosts co-exist with their living personae, and Colonel Sanders and Johnny Walker make appearances in odd corners of Japan has to be accepted as bona fide weird. What saves Kafka on the Shore from mere literary contrivance is the sense one has that all this weirdness is integral to Murakami's mentality, that he's not just trying to diddle the reader's weirdness tastebuds but that he has genuinely weird but pertinent perceptions to report.
Murakami fits into a tradition of phantasmagorical writing in Japanese. His obvious literary forefather is Soseki Natsume, author of "I Am a Cat." In fact, Kafka spends several afternoons reading Soseki Natsume, as well as Tanizaki and Lady Murasaki, during the course of the novel. I suppose this notion of Murakami as part of a specifically Japanese literary tradition is utterly insignificant to English readers, but it does matter to anyone who wants to get to the core of Murakami's sensibilities. Like Yukio Mishima, Muarakami seems curiously unskillful at elements of Japanese literary style; his vocabulary of kanji (Chinese pictographic characters) seems spotty, while his inclusion of 'outside' words will strike Japanese readers as impure. The English translation conveys some of this stylistic awkwardness by its choice of odd American slang to express items that are squarely Japanese.
In the end, I read novels chiefly for diversion. For enjoyment. Don't you? I found this freakish novel quite diverting. Engrossing. I could hardly put it down to fall asleep at night. Whatever you might make of its content, you'll find yourself dragged into its weird unreality.
[Postscript, two days later: If you are the kind of reader that judges a book by its ending, you'd better knock two stars off my rating of Kafka on the Shore. The last 30 pages of the book are utterly unworthy of the imagination that created the earlier scenes. But you might say the same thing about the endings of almost every Dickens novel.]
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