Kafka on the Shore (Unabridged)
-
- $19.99
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
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.
Customer Reviews
Excellent.
I think it’s the best introductory book into Murkakami’s style of writing. Great story telling. Mind bending. Engaging in every aspect for every age and gender. Murakami at his finest.
Not a fun read
Disjointed and full of weird stuff that serves no purpose but to be weird. Plot lines that go nowhere. Gratuitous sex and violence.
One of my favorites
Nobody reads reviews, we simply judge a book based on its 5-star rating.
In case you do read this, this book is indeed a coming of age story. It’s also a story about finding oneself. It’s definitely a historical commentary, while at the same time allegorical. Its one of my favorite philosophical novels!