Haruki Murakami-"Kafka at the Shore"
Vintage
January 3, 2006

Haruki Murakami is the master of the mindfuck. He is great at taking the reader on an extraordinary journey that is hard to put down but induces a lot of head scratching.

His latest journey involves a 15 year old runaway, Kafka Tamura, and a lovable simpleton who always talks in third person, Nakata, who has the ability (for awhile) to converse with cats. The two never meet, but their actions run perpendicular to each other, eventually intersecting towards the climax of the story. There are a lot of key minor characters, including a guy who steals the souls of cats, a girl who everyone thinks is a boy (she is constantly talked about as "he" along the pages), a woman who may or may not be Tamura's mother, and a boy named Crow (among many others who all have their own points of interest).

Cats talk, leeches fall from the sky and Colonial Sanders is a pimp (sort of). This is a very strange tale that, after awhile, seems normal. Murakami has the reader so wrapped up into this world that he could throw anything on those pages and it would only enhance this already great piece of fiction.

Written by: RF
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