Haruki Murakami – Kafka on the Shore
This is the second Murakami I’ve read and I must say I liked it. The first one was After Dark, but i didn’t like it as much.
Murakami has a way of keeping the reader always interested and waiting for some new mysterious thing to happen. That’s why each time i started reading a chapter i couldn’t stop until i fell asleep.
We are in Japan..obviously. Kafka Tamura is a 15 year old boy that decides to run away from home after his father “cursed” him. The curse says that he will kill his dad and sleep with his mother and sister. So, the boy figures that if he goes far away from home he won’t be able to kill his father and the chances of meeting his mother – who left with his sister when he was a child – are pretty slim. Along the way, he meets these nice people that let him work and live at a library. One of those people is a woman in her fifties called Sakura, which he falls in love with.
This is when the boy comes face to face with destiny.
Nakata is a man in his sixties that can talk to cats after having an accident when he was in school. Without even realizing it, he finds himself in a journey to find a stone that will help put the world in balance.
I could go on trying to connect all the dots here for you, but then what fun would you have when reading the book?
Actually, this is one of the things i liked most about he book. How the stories are connected to each other and they all come down to one thing: you can’t escape what life has planned out for you.
I liked how the author surprises us with fish and leeches falling from the sky, or with unexpected turnarounds. I also liked the descriptions and that is rare, but Murakami’s descriptions are quite interesting.
Sometimes fate is like a sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you should imagine.
