Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel (Translator)

From the Publisher

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.

The New York Times - Steven Moore

Murakami's spin on this theme and the Oedipus myth is daringly original and compulsively readable, enabled by Philip Gabriel's wonderfully fluent translation. Kafka on the Shore is warmly recommended; read it to your cat.

Nola Theiss - KLIATT

The two words that best describe this novel are "bewildering" and "metaphysical," yet the story is also incredibly readable. The hero describes himself as "the world's toughest 15-year-old," but in reality he is a well-heeled teenager who is either escaping a pre-ordained destiny or in search of his lost mother and sister?—?so YAs can relate to his story. Then, there is the parallel story of Nakata, an old man who?—?during a mysterious attack of either poisonous gas or poison mushroom during WW II?—?was struck down for three weeks and became a simpleton with mysterious powers, like being able to talk to cats. His story adds to the texture and the confusion of the plot. Nonetheless, Marakami is such a good story teller that despite the unbelievable aspects of the plot, the endearing qualities of Nakata and the pluckiness of Kafka will keep the reader going through this lengthy modern novel. YAs will love discussing the meaning of the story and the significance of the characters, like the librarian who might, in Kafka's fantasies, be his mother, and even the mysterious appearance of Colonel Sanders. Well-written and confusing in the best possible way, this semi-fantasy will appeal to many YAs. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2005, Random House, Vintage International, 467p., Ages 15 to adult.

Library Journal

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.

Kirkus Reviews

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; aghostly 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

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Reading Group Guide

1. The first character to speak in Kafka on the Shore is the “boy named Crow” [p. 3]. Who is he? What part of Kafka Tamura’s psyche does he represent?

2. “Kafka,” we later learn, means “crow” in Czech. What relationship is Murakami trying to suggest between Franz Kafka, Kafka Tamura, the boy named Crow, and actual crows? At what significant moments do crows appear in the novel? What symbolic value do they have?

3. When Kafka meets Sakura on the bus, they agree that “even chance meetings . . . are the results of karma” and that “things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence” [p. 33]. What role does fate, or meaningful coincidence, play in the novel? Is it karma that determines Kafka’s destiny?

4. Much of the novel alternates between Kafka’s story and Nakata’s. What effects does Murakami create by moving the reader back and forth between parallel narratives? What is the relationship between Nakata and Kafka?

5. When Kafka is a young boy, his father tells him: “Someday you will murder your father and be with your mother” [p. 202], the same destiny as Oedipus. Kafka’s father also tells him that he will sleep with his sister and that there is nothing he can do to prevent this prophecy from being fulfilled. How do Kafka’s attempts to escape his fate bring him closer to fulfilling it?

6. The phrase “for the time being” is repeated throughout Kafka on the Shore. Why has Murakami chosen to use this qualifying statement so often? How is theconventional concept of time stretched and challenged by events in the novel? Why does Miss Saeki tell Kafka: “Time’s rules don’t apply here. Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart” [p. 219]?

7. In what ways are the boundaries between past and present, dreaming and waking, fantasy and reality blurred and often erased in Kafka on the Shore?

8. The teacher in charge of the children who lost consciousness in the woods during World War II writes to her professor many years later and tells him: “I find the worldview that runs through all of your publications very convincing—namely that as individuals each of us is extremely isolated, while at the same time we are all linked by a prototypical memory” [p. 96]. How are the main characters of the novel—Kafka, Nakata, Oshima, Miss Saeki—“extremely isolated”? In what ways do they share a “prototypical memory”? What would that memory be?

9. Kafka Tamura seems, in some mysterious way, to be both Miss Saeki’s son and the ghost of her long-dead lover. How does Murakami intend us to understand this shifting and apparently impossible dual identity?

10. What is the relationship between Nakata’s quest for the “entrance stone” and Kafka’s journey into the forest?

11. In what ways can Kafka on the Shore be read as a love story?

12. The supernatural shape-shifter, who takes the form of Colonel Sanders, tells Hoshino that he is neither God nor Buddha but a kind of “overseer, supervising something to make sure it fulfills its original role. Checking the correlation between different worlds, making sure things are in the right order” [p. 284]. What are these different worlds? Is Colonel Sanders talking about parallel universes?

13. Kafka on the Shore is, for the most part, a realistic novel, yet it contains many magical elements—Nakata’s ability to talk with cats and make fish fall from the sky, the shape-shifting Colonel Sanders, the middle-aged Miss Saeki visiting Kafka as her fifteen-year-old self. What is Murakami saying about the nature of reality and our beliefs about it through these seemingly impossible episodes?

14. At the end of the novel, Oshima tells Kafka, “You’ve grown up” [p. 463]. In what ways has Kafka been changed by his experience? What are the most important things he has learned? Why does he feel he has entered “a brand-new world” [p. 467]?

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