Kafka on the Shore

click here for more details, find new or used items	Haruki Murakami Used from £3.89 Pages: 656 (Hardcover) ISBN: 1843431106 Pub: The Harvill Press Pub date: 2005-01-06 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 114330

Reader Reviews:

Good but not perfect (0/0 people found this helpful)

While a perfect representant of the post-modernist family of opus, the supernatural elements failed to grasp me in their tendrils. The language is beautiful, there is a definite poetry with the narration but I failed to be mesmerized.
A good read with some shortcomings

A bold and surreal novel (2/2 people found this helpful)

Murakami's novel follows the fate of two unconventional characters. The first is called Kafka Tamura. He undertakes to run away from home on his fifteenth birthday, travel to a remote place and spend some time living in a library. His project turns out to be successful and so he finds himself at the Komura Library in Takamatsu where he meets Oshima and the enigmatic Miss Saeki.
The other character is an older man called Nakata, a master cat-finder who is able to converse with cats although he can neither read nor write.
Both Kafka and Nakata find their way to Takamatsu although they never meet. During their wanderings they meet all kinds of characters, some of them have a surrealistic nature. Indeed quite a few scenes have a dream-like quality because they are not rational. It is as if the reader were reading a sort of stream-of-consciousness but its form is fully structured unlike similar passages found in James Joyce or Virginia Wolf. It is a tale of quest which is highly inventive with cats conversing with people, fish raining from the sky and soldiers rambling in a forest, un-aged since the second World War...
The superb reading for Naxos Audiobooks is done by Sean Barrett and Oliver Le Sueur. A fantastic performance.

Simply Murakami (1/1 people found this helpful)

Yet again, he doesn't fail to capture you with one of his masterpieces. There is no point in me rewriting the a synopsis but simply put, anyone whom I recommended his books were just thrilled to have been introduced to this guy's charming world.

All I can say is go ahead and read this and also get "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" and "Norwegian Wood" too. It is pretty much guaranteed that you cannot go wrong with those.

A quieter beat (2/3 people found this helpful)

Sometimes you voraciously read a living author's books and then realise that he or she should be due for publishing a new one shortly. At this point you start to worry a bit. Will it be as good? I had to wait a couple of years for Haruki Murakami.

He has quite a substantial back catalogue to get through - if you have read at least some of them, you'll have a fair idea of what to expect with Kafka On The Shore; if you haven't then you may find yourself hunting them all down as I have been doing for the last nine years.

Kafka comes close. And it is not at all disappointing. I think perhaps that it is quieter than other Murakami works, some of which pack a substantial emotional punch if you're generally a sensitive sort of person, but it is tightly plotted and wonderfully smooth.

Hooked on Murakami (2/2 people found this helpful)

This book opened my mind and assaulted my normalness.
It is poetry and anticipation, comfort and company.
Haruki Murakami writes like no other. His books became my friends and I would never be able to praise them enough.

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