Meet Kafka, a fifteen-year-old runaway with an Oedipal fate. Now meet Nakata, an elderly man who has lost most of his cognitive faculties but can talk to cats. Now set the two on a converging path, mix in a confused truck-driver, some hot librarian action, and Murakami’s penchant for the surreal and mind-twisting and you have a novel that will leave you wondering “Wait, what?”
— Emily
Description
Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s great storytellers at the peak of his powers.
Here we meet a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who is on the run, and Nakata, an aging simpleton who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, acclaimed author 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, in what is a truly remarkable journey.
About the Author
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many honors is the Yomiuri Literary Prize, whose previous recipients include Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe.
Praise For…
“As powerful as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. . . . Reading Murakami . . . is a striking experience in consciousness expansion.” –The Chicago Tribune
“An insistently metaphysical mind-bender.” –The New Yorker
“If he has not achieved that status already, Haruki Murakami is on course to becoming the most widely read Japanese writer outside Japan, past or present.” –New York Times
