Kafka on the Shore – the Novel by Haruki Murakami

Kafka on the Shore is one of my favourite novels written by . This is not a review – just some thoughts. I like how he tells two stories and cleverly intertwines the two. This talent of his I have seen before in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World – my other favourite. I haven’t read enough of Murakami to judge out of all of them. But so far these two are top of the list – probably the latter more so.



I love the way he weaves the real and the unreal together and makes the story mesmerizing. The story is even more elaborate than Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World involving an old man who talks to cats and his whole purpose in life is to find lost cats, a 15 year old boy called Kafka who runs away from home to avoid an Oedipal curse. Having read a couple of Murakami novels, I was surprised at the heavy sexual overtones. In other books, the physical act is hinted at to the point that you’d think the author seemed almost disinterested. Here, the focus is unmistakable. He purposely dives in and dwells on the subject throughout as if it was a challenge.

Having done a little search on the internet, I found thenewcanon.com which compares Murakami style to those of other writers:

    “This re-examination of the real is at the heart of the fantastical landscapes of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, the pulp fiction-ish narratives of Philip K. Dick, the ‘alternative universe’ histories of Michael Chabon and Philip Roth, and the quasi-science fiction scenarios of Wallace’s Infinite Jest, McCarthy’s The Road and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Indeed, the pervasive incorporation of sci-fi plots into serious fiction, from Kazuo Ishiguro to Jonathan Lethem, is a recurring and unmistakable sign of this pronounced shift in the literary weather.

    Few writers have poked more holes in conventional notions of reality than the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Other authors have explored what has come to be known as “magical realism,” but most of them— such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier and Ben Okri—have set their visionary tales in Third World locales where myth and folklore loom large over the cultural landscape. In these environments, magical realism seems a natural extension of an on-going and tradition-laden literary dialogue. But Murakami concocts his magical stories in the midst of affluent modern-day consumer settings.”

The above extract explains Murakami much better than I ever could. I’ve read Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, McCarthy’s The Road and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale – and loved them all. Though I’ve got to add Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist to this. If you have read and enjoyed any of the above, then I’m sure you’d enjoy reading Kafka on the Shore too.