E-book
Kafka on the shore [electronic resource] / Haruki Murakami ; translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.
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.
Record details
- ISBN: 9781400044818 (electronic bk. : Adobe Reader)
- ISBN: 1400044812 (electronic bk. : Adobe Reader)
- ISBN: 9781400044818 (electronic bk. : Mobipocket Reader)
- ISBN: 1400044812 (electronic bk. : Mobipocket Reader)
- Physical Description: 436 p. ; 25 cm.
- Edition: 1st American ed.
- Publisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf : 2005.
Content descriptions
| Reproduction Note: | Electronic reproduction. New York : Knopf Publishing Group, 2005. Requires Adobe Digital Editions (file size: 1842 KB) or Mobipocket Reader (file size: 489 KB). |
| System Details Note: | Requires OverDrive Media Console |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Runaway teenagers > Fiction. Japan > Fiction. |
| Genre: | EBOOK. Electronic books. |
Other Formats and Editions
Electronic resources
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2004 November #2
Acclaimed Japanese novelist Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1997, among others) navigates the surreal world in this tale of two troubled souls whose lives are entwined by fate. Fifteen-year-old Tokyo resident Kafka Tamura runs away from home to escape a murderous curse inflicted by his famous sculptor father. Elderly Satoru Nakata wanders his way through each day after a mysterious childhood accident turns his mind into a blank slate. The relationship between the strange strangers isn't revealed until the end of the novel, whose precarious scenarios include a grisly killing, a rainstorm of leeches, and a freezer lined with the severed heads of cats ("Cut-off heads of all colors and sizes, arranged on three shelves like oranges at a fruit stand"). The book's title comes from a painting, poem, and song linked to a tormented library matron, who inhabits a limbo between the present and past. Replete with riddles, exhaustingly eccentric characters (a pimp dressed as Colonel Sanders, a Hegel-quoting whore), and imagery ranging from the sublime to the grotesque, Murakami's literary high-wire acts have earned him both boos and ahs from connoisseurs of contemporary fiction. What side you come down on depends on your predilection for the perverse. ((Reviewed November 15, 2004)) Copyright 2004 Booklist Reviews. - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 2005 February
The surreal lifeJapanese author Haruki Murakami's latest offering, Kafka on the Shore, is vast, complex, odd, funny and strangely peaceful: business as usual, but more impressive business than some recent books. It describes two parallel odysseys across space and time (literally), linked by a strange, ambiguous pop tune written by one of the book's mysterious characters. Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old runaway, struggles to dodge an Oedipal fate; simultaneously, Nagata, an illiterate old man who can talk to cats, searches for an all-powerful stone. The two stories link neatly—and yet Murakami makes sure we are never entirely confident in their connection.
Murakami has written many novels about tough, disenchanted young men, and Kafka is no exception. Through his horny and visceral eyes, his sexual adventures, such as a non-therapeutic massage from a winsome teenager or sex with a woman in her mid-50s (who may be his mother), acquire pornographic rawness—like his life, which has the simplicity of youthful fear behind it. And yet, by journey's end, Kafka experiences losses that ultimately deepen and empower him, making his juvenile panting and belligerence worth our tolerance.
If Kafka is the book's raging ego, the elderly Nagata is its unlikely id. Early in his quest, he fights with whiskey-label presence Johnnie Walker when he learns that the stolid advertising symbol has been disemboweling Nagata's feline soulmates. Everything from a rain of leeches to Colonel Sanders lies in his path as he pushes onward, and yet his dignity and calm go unruffled.
The gradual union of these stories brings a pleasant release, despite the all-too-familiar difficulties leading up to it. Murakami's progress here resembles that of novelists like Paul Auster and Jonathan Lethem, whose early storylines carried by external strangeness have of late given way to a dense burrowing into truly thorny human psychologies—which, as we well know, could make the wildest novelistic creation seem more ordinary than checkers.
Max Winter writes from New York City. Copyright 2005 BookPage Reviews.
- Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2004 December #1
Two mysterious quests form the core of Murakami's absorbing seventh novel, whose encyclopedic breadth recalls his earlier successes, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997).In the first of two parallel narratives, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura drops out of school and leaves the Tokyo home he shares with his artist-sculptor father, to seek the mother and sister who left them when Kafka was four years old. Traveling to the small town of Takamatsu, he spends his days at a free library, reconnects with a resourceful older girl who becomes his de facto mentor, and begins to reenact the details of a mysterious "incident" from more than 60 years ago. In 1944, a group of 16 schoolchildren inexplicably "lost consciousness" during an outing in a rural mountain area. Only one of them, Satoru Nakata, emerged from the incident damaged-and it's he who, decades later, becomes the story's second protagonist: a childlike, scarcely articulate, mentally challenged sexagenarian who is supported by a possibly guilty government's "sub city" and possesses the ability to hold conversations (charmingly funny ones) with cats. With masterly skill and considerable subtlety, Murakami gradually plaits together the experiences and fates of Kafka and Nakata, underscoring their increasingly complex symbolic significance with several dazzling subplots and texts: a paternal prophecy echoing the Oedipus legend (from which Kafka also seeks escape); a faux-biblical occurrence in which things that ought not to be in the skies are raining down from them; the bizarre figures of a whore devoted to Hegel's philosophy; and an otherworldly pimp whose sartorial affectations cloak his true menacing nature; a ghostly forest into which Russian soldiers inexplicably disappear; and-in glancing allusions to Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki-a clever homage to that author's beguiling 1905 fantasy, I Am a Cat. Murakami is of course himself an immensely reader-friendly novelist, and never has he offered more enticing fare than this enchantingly inventive tale.A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.First printing of 60,000 Copyright Kirkus 2004 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2005 January #1
In this highly surrealistic offering from distinguished Japanese author Murakami (After the Quake: Stories), two seemingly unrelated stories cleverly told in alternating chapters eventually collide and meld. In the first story, a 15-year-old assumes the alias Kafka Tamura and runs away from his home in Tokyo to Takamatsu. While there, he is befriended by a young girl, hides out in a private library, and seemingly falls in love with the library director. Meanwhile, the elderly, feeble-minded Mr. Nakata, who can talk with cats, encounters a series of unusual characters with names like Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders. Later ensnared in a murder, Nakata leaves town and is befriended by a young man who becomes his invaluable companion. Kafka and Nakata are brought together when Nakata is compelled to search for the "entrance stone" that connects their parallel worlds. Parts of Murakami's story are violently gruesome and sexually explicit, and the plot line following Nakata is rather eerie and disturbing. Yet the bulk of this narrative is erudite, lyrical, and compelling; followers of Murakami's work should approve. Recommended for larger fiction collections.-Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2004 December #1
Previous books such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood have established Murakami as a true original, a fearless writer possessed of a wildly uninhibited imagination and a legion of fiercely devoted fans. In this latest addition to the author's incomparable oeuvre, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura runs away from home, both to escape his father's oedipal prophecy and to find his long-lost mother and sister. As Kafka flees, so too does Nakata, an elderly simpleton whose quiet life has been upset by a gruesome murder. (A wonderfully endearing character, Nakata has never recovered from the effects of a mysterious World War II incident that left him unable to read or comprehend much, but did give him the power to speak with cats.) What follows is a kind of double odyssey, as Kafka and Nakata are drawn inexorably along their separate but somehow linked paths, groping to understand the roles fate has in store for them. Murakami likes to blur the boundary between the real and the surreal-we are treated to such oddities as fish raining from the sky; a forest-dwelling pair of Imperial Army soldiers who haven't aged since WWII; and a hilarious cameo by fried chicken king Colonel Sanders-but he also writes touchingly about love, loneliness and friendship. Occasionally, the writing drifts too far into metaphysical musings-mind-bending talk of parallel worlds, events occurring outside of time-and things swirl a bit at the end as the author tries, perhaps too hard, to make sense of things. But by this point, his readers, like his characters, will go just about anywhere Murakami wants them to, whether they "get" it or not. Agent, Amanda Urban at ICM. 60,000 first printing. (Jan. 24) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
