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Haruki Murakami

Kafka on the Shore Paperback – January 3, 2006

by Haruki Murakami (Author)

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Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s great storytellers at the peak of his powers.

Here we meet a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who is on the run, and Nakata, an aging simpleton who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, acclaimed author Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder, in what is a truly remarkable journey.

Print length

480 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date

January 3, 2006
Reading age

13 - 17 years
Dimensions

5.13 x 1.02 x 7.93 inches
ISBN-10

1400079276
ISBN-13

978-1400079278
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Popular Highlights in this book

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“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
Highlighted by 4,014 Kindle readers
“Kafka, in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”
Highlighted by 2,998 Kindle readers
“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
Highlighted by 2,445 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Review

“As powerful as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. . . . Reading Murakami . . . is a striking experience in consciousness expansion.” –The Chicago Tribune

“An insistently metaphysical mind-bender.”
–The New Yorker

“If he has not achieved that status already, Haruki Murakami is on course to becoming the most widely read Japanese writer outside Japan, past or present.”
–New York Times

From the Back Cover

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.

"From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many honors is the Yomiuri Literary Prize, whose previous recipients include Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Cash isn't the only thing I take from my father's study when I leave home. I take a small, old gold lighter--I like the design and feel of it--and a folding knife with a really sharp blade. Made to skin deer, it has a five-inch blade and a nice heft. Probably something he bought on one of his trips abroad. I also take a sturdy, bright pocket flashlight out of a drawer. Plus sky blue Revo sunglasses to disguise my age.

I think about taking my father's favorite Sea-Dweller Oyster Rolex. It's a beautiful watch, but something flashy will only attract attention. My cheap plastic Casio watch with an alarm and stopwatch will do just fine, and might actually be more useful. Reluctantly, I return the Rolex to its drawer.

From the back of another drawer I take out a photo of me and my older sister when we were little, the two of us on a beach somewhere with grins plastered across our faces. My sister's looking off to the side so half her face is in shadow and her smile is neatly cut in half. It's like one of those Greek tragedy masks in a textbook that's half one idea and half the opposite. Light and dark. Hope and despair. Laughter and sadness. Trust and loneliness. For my part I'm staring straight ahead, undaunted, at the camera. Nobody else is there at the beach. My sister and I have on swimsuits--hers a red floral-print one-piece, mine some baggy old blue trunks. I'm holding a plastic stick in my hand. White foam is washing over our feet.

Who took this, and where and when, I have no clue. And how could I have looked so happy? And why did my father keep just that one photo? The whole thing is a total mystery. I must have been three, my sister nine. Did we ever really get along that well? I have no memory of ever going to the beach with my family. No memory of going anywhere with them. No matter, though--there is no way I'm going to leave that photo with my father, so I put it in my wallet. I don't have any photos of my mother. My father had thrown them all away.

After giving it some thought I decide to take the cell phone with me. Once he finds out I've taken it, my father will probably get the phone company to cut off service. Still, I toss it into my backpack, along with the adapter. Doesn't add much weight, so why not. When it doesn't work anymore I'll just chuck it.

Just the bare necessities, that's all I need. Choosing which clothes to take is the hardest thing. I'll need a couple sweaters and pairs of underwear. But what about shirts and trousers? Gloves, mufflers, shorts, a coat? There's no end to it. One thing I do know, though. I don't want to wander around some strange place with a huge backpack that screams out, Hey, everybody, check out the runaway! Do that and someone is sure to sit up and take notice. Next thing you know the police will haul me in and I'll be sent straight home. If I don't wind up in some gang first.

Any place cold is definitely out, I decide. Easy enough, just choose the opposite--a warm place. Then I can leave the coat and gloves behind, and get by with half the clothes. I pick out wash-and-wear-type things, the lightest ones I have, fold them neatly, and stuff them in my backpack. I also pack a three-season sleeping bag, the kind that rolls up nice and tight, toilet stuff, a rain poncho, notebook and pen, a Walkman and ten discs--got to have my music--along with a spare rechargeable battery. That's about it. No need for any cooking gear, which is too heavy and takes up too much room, since I can buy food at the local convenience store.

It takes a while but I'm able to subtract a lot of things from my list. I add things, cross them off, then add a whole other bunch and cross them off, too.

My fifteenth birthday is the ideal time to run away from home. Any earlier and it'd be too soon. Any later and I would have missed my chance.

During my first two years in junior high, I'd worked out, training myself for this day. I started practicing judo in the first couple years of grade school, and still went sometimes in junior high. But I didn't join any school teams. Whenever I had the time I'd jog around the school grounds, swim, or go to the local gym. The young trainers there gave me free lessons, showing me the best kind of stretching exercises and how to use the fitness machines to bulk up. They taught me which muscles you use every day and which ones can only be built up with machines, even the correct way to do a bench press. I'm pretty tall to begin with, and with all this exercise I've developed pretty broad shoulders and pecs. Most strangers would take me for seventeen. If I ran away looking my actual age, you can imagine all the problems that would cause.

Other than the trainers at the gym and the housekeeper who comes to our house every other day--and of course the bare minimum required to get by at school--I barely talk to anyone. For a long time my father and I have avoided seeing each other. We live under the same roof, but our schedules are totally different. He spends most of his time in his studio, far away, and I do my best to avoid him.

The school I'm going to is a private junior high for kids who are upper-class, or at least rich. It's the kind of school where, unless you really blow it, you're automatically promoted to the high school on the same campus. All the students dress neatly, have nice straight teeth, and are boring as hell. Naturally I have zero friends. I've built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself. Who could like somebody like that? They all keep an eye on me, from a distance. They might hate me, or even be afraid of me, but I'm just glad they didn't bother me. Because I had tons of things to take care of, including spending a lot of my free time devouring books in the school library.

I always paid close attention to what was said in class, though. Just like the boy named Crow suggested.

The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn't going to be very useful in the real world, that's for sure. Let's face it, teachers are basically a bunch of morons. But you've got to remember this: you're running away from home. You probably won't have any chance to go to school anymore, so like it or not you'd better absorb whatever you can while you've got the chance. Become like a sheet of blotting paper and soak it all in. Later on you can figure out what to keep and what to unload.

I did what he said, like I almost always do. My brain like a sponge, I focused on every word said in class and let it all sink in, figured out what it meant, and committed everything to memory. Thanks to this, I barely had to study outside of class, but always came out near the top on exams.

My muscles were getting hard as steel, even as I grew more withdrawn and quiet. I tried hard to keep my emotions from showing so that no one--classmates and teachers alike--had a clue what I was thinking. Soon I'd be launched into the rough adult world, and I knew I'd have to be tougher than anybody if I wanted to survive.

My eyes in the mirror are cold as a lizard's, my expression fixed and unreadable. I can't remember the last time I laughed or even showed a hint of a smile to other people. Even to myself.

I'm not trying to imply I can keep up this silent, isolated facade all the time. Sometimes the wall I've erected around me comes crumbling down. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes, before I even realize what's going on, there I am--naked and defenseless and totally confused. At times like that I always feel an omen calling out to me, like a dark, omnipresent pool of water.

A dark, omnipresent pool of water.

It was probably always there, hidden away somewhere. But when the time comes it silently rushes out, chilling every cell in your body. You drown in that cruel flood, gasping for breath. You cling to a vent near the ceiling, struggling, but the air you manage to breathe is dry and burns your throat. Water and thirst, cold and heat--these supposedly opposite elements combine to assault you.

The world is a huge space, but the space that will take you in--and it doesn't have to be very big--is nowhere to be found. You seek a voice, but what do you get? Silence. You look for silence, but guess what? All you hear over and over and over is the voice of this omen. And sometimes this prophetic voice pushes a secret switch hidden deep inside your brain.

Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, full to the banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart.

Before running away from home I wash my hands and face, trim my nails, swab out my ears, and brush my teeth. I take my time, making sure my whole body's well scrubbed. Being really clean is sometimes the most important thing there is. I gaze carefully at my face in the mirror. Genes I'd gotten from my father and mother--not that I have any recollection of what she looked like--created this face. I can do my best to not let any emotions show, keep my eyes from revealing anything, bulk up my muscles, but there's not much I can do about my looks. I'm stuck with my father's long, thick eyebrows and the deep lines between them. I could probably kill him if I wanted to--I'm sure strong enough--and I can erase my mother from my memory. But there's no way to erase the DNA they passed down to me. If I wanted to drive that away I'd have to get rid of me.

There's an omen contained in that. A mechanism buried inside of me.

A mechanism buried inside of you.

I switch off the light and leave the bathroom. A heavy, damp stillness lies over the house. The whispers of people who don't exist, the breath of the dead. I look around, standing stock-still, and take a deep breath. The clock shows three p.m., the two hands cold and distant. They're pretending to be noncommittal, but I know they're not on my side. It's nearly time for me to say good-bye. I pick up my backpack and slip it over my shoulders. I've carried it any number of times, but now it feels so much heavier.

Shikoku, I decide. That's where I'll go. There's no particular reason it has to be Shikoku, only that studying the map I got the feeling that's where I should head. The more I look at the map--actually every time I study it--the more I feel Shikoku tugging at me. It's far south of Tokyo, separated from the mainland by water, with a warm climate. I've never been there, have no friends or relatives there, so if somebody started looking for me--which I kind of doubt--Shikoku would be the last place they'd think of.

I pick up the ticket I'd reserved at the counter and climb aboard the night bus. This is the cheapest way to get to Takamatsu--just a shade over ninety bucks. Nobody pays me any attention, asks how old I am, or gives me a second look. The bus driver mechanically checks my ticket.

Only a third of the seats are taken. Most passengers are traveling alone, like me, and the bus is strangely silent. It's a long trip to Takamatsu, ten hours according to the schedule, and we'll be arriving early in the morning. But I don't mind. I've got plenty of time. The bus pulls out of the station at eight, and I push my seat back. No sooner do I settle down than my consciousness, like a battery that's lost its charge, starts to fade away, and I fall asleep.

Sometime in the middle of the night a hard rain begins to fall. I wake up every once in a while, part the chintzy curtain at the window, and gaze out at the highway rushing by. Raindrops beat against the glass, blurring streetlights alongside the road that stretch off into the distance at identical intervals like they were set down to measure the earth. A new light rushes up close and in an instant fades off behind us. I check my watch and see it's past midnight. Automatically shoved to the front, my fifteenth birthday makes its appearance.

Hey, happy birthday, the boy named Crow says.

Thanks, I reply.

The omen is still with me, though, like a shadow. I check to make sure the wallaround me is still in place. Then I close the curtain and fall back asleep.

*********

Visit Haruki Murakami's official website to read more from Kafka on the Shore.

www.harukimurakami.com

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (January 3, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400079276
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400079278
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 13 - 17 years
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.13 x 1.02 x 7.93 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #16,142 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #184 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #222 in Magical Realism
- #1,659 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Haruki Murakami

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Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul.

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Bryan Desmond

I’ve met you before. In another land, in another library.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 18, 2021

Verified Purchase

Well, this was impressive.

I have read one other Haruki Murakami novel some years ago, that being Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and while I really enjoyed that book, this one I loved. And besides, I can feel echoes of that one in this one, and those kind of connections bring me great joy, whether I am projecting them or not.

What to even say about this book? What to say about Haruki Murakami? His works have the interestingly dichotomous ability to mix feelings of the small and the large, the personal and the sweeping, the banal and the mystical. Often while reading I'll find myself thinking... "What the f***?" And I can answer this only with the mantra: "No idea, it's Murakami." Some people maybe can't get behind that and still enjoy the novel, but I love it. The bizarre occurs without explanation, and the dreamlike is commonplace. He leads you from one question to the next so effectively that even when you don't circle back around for the answers, you're having too much fun to mind.

And Murakami's sheer skill... His prose is excellent by default, and ranges into the beautiful. He paints a vivid picture without being overly descriptive, and he allows you to sink into a sort of flavor of a mood. There seems to be a very human understanding that bleeds through onto the page, and not just in his prose but in his character work. He taps into the heart of things, and reminds you why life's simple pleasures are pleasures in the first place. This is a man who seems to truly live, a man who knows how to take his loves and interests and inject them into a story that sticks with you.

Kafka on the Shore is at its heart the inexorable, tidal pulling of two disparate storylines. That of Kafka Tamura, 15-year-old runaway haunted by a dark prophecy, and that of Satoru Nakata, an old man who suffered a childhood affliction that left him... different. How these two stories interact and interweave will leave you feeling like you're reading a riddle at times. Thematically he is playing with dreams, imagination, and responsibility. The darkness of the human subconscious. Ghosts. Memory. Time. Libraries.... Honestly, I find the book hard to capture in words, futile devices that they are. There were sections of it where I even doubted the reality of what I was reading. I mean, my favorite character in the book was probably Colonel Sanders. Do with that what you will.

So much of this story takes place in that dark, ethereal labyrinth of your mind that it feels like you can only accurately explain half of it. And that second, unexplainable half is where the true magic lies. Which is, I believe, why I'm so drawn to his stories; they leave much to the imagination, and there is plenty leftover to ponder. Nothing is so tantalizing as the unknown, and Murakami understands that deeply. But as strange as the novel is at times, it really is beautiful. Emotionally effective, to say the least. I want to use the word gorgeous, even. The character work feels genuine, borderline romanticized. And the entire work is so intricately interwoven that it feels like the kind of thing you could jump right back into when you finish, which may have even been Murakami's intention.

If you can't tell by the unfiltered praise, I loved this book. It belongs on my favorites shelf, I think. I don't think it's for everyone. It was overtly sexual in a way that caught me off guard, and in a way that I can imagine will make some readers uncomfortable. There are also scenes of overt, sometimes shocking, violence. But I don't fault Murakami for exploring the dark recesses of the human experience, or of stories in general. In fact, I think it would feel strange were those areas of darkness missing.

Having just finished, I have that same sort of melancholic regret that I sometimes have when I finish a Ghibli movie; a long journey well-ended, characters coming full-circle with lessons learned, a strange new world that I want to stay in a little while longer. Needless to say, I'll be reading more of his work.

"Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there—to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there."

29 people found this helpful

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ET

A couple of steps up from Harry Potter, but not quite Kafka

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 23, 2018

Verified Purchase

I'm a fan of surrealist, magical realist, and existentialist literature. I love the works of Kafka, Hesse, Schulz, Mann, Marquez, Carrington, and others. When I heard how lauded Haruki Murakami was for his surrealist or magical realist stories, I resolved to read them, beginning with his best work. Through some research, I found that Kafka on the Shore was consistently rated as his best. Reading it, I found that the book resembles literary fiction less than it does commercial genre fiction, particularly junior fiction, or young adult magical fantasy or supernatural thriller, with some implausible sexual fantasies added. The book is thoroughly engaging, and compels you to read through to the end to see how it is concluded, so in this way it is successful. But the tone of the book, and its prose and its metaphors, resemble the Percy Jackson or Harry Potter series more than anything by Kafka, Schulz, or Marquez. Kafka is evoked as one of many pop cultural references that are scattered throughout the book than through any close kinship to the Czech author's style. The prose is a little too simple and clumsy and lacks the same linguistic or poetic magic as Marquez or Schulz. There may be a lot that is lost in translation from Japanese. The simplicity of the language also may be because the novel's chief protagonists are a fifteen-year-old boy, a cognitively impaired man, and an uneducated truck driver, and to some degree we are forced to see the world through their eyes. But overall it sounded as if most of the book was narrated by a fifteen-year-old.

True to form for magical realism, yes, a lot of magical events occur. Some of them successfully contribute to an atmosphere of strangeness and mystery, while others seem to be more superfluous or random, added for the purposes of cute whimsy, particularly in the middle of the book, when it seems that the author runs out of ideas. In a way that is not true to form for magical realism, though, the protagonists' reactions to the magical events are always along the lines of remaking about how very strange the events are. Plus, there are plot points about magical stones that open portals to other worlds that have to be open and shut at the right times, and there are clever talking cats. All of this edges the story closer to fantasy fiction; characters in magical realist stories wouldn't bat an eye at how unusual the occurrences are. However strange and implausible the magic is, though, none of them are any more implausible than the scenes in which the teenage protagonist interacts with the two main female characters, scenes that seem to be lifted straight out of adolescent male sexual fantasy, though to Murakami's defense, this hints at the possibility that the story is happening in the mind of the teenage protagonist; or maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's just the author's fantasies; I have no idea.

I think the novel could have done well without any magic at all. Murakami endows some of the main characters with such compelling and likable description (particularly the library clerk, the truck driver, and the cognitively impaired man) that it makes me wish that he simply had written a slice-of-life realist fiction novel about them.

Overall, it's a good book. If you want a book to take with you on a plane but you need a story with more depth than one about wizarding worlds, this is the one for you. If you're looking for something along the lines of James Joyce or Franz Kafka, prepare for something a little more watered down than stories by those authors but still enjoyable.

13 people found this helpful

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Angie Kiker

Fantastic audio book to go along with the book while you are reading

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 9, 2012

Verified Purchase

The voices in this audio version are excellent. This book is amazing, and I enjoyed getting to listen to it when I needed to work, cook, and clean, (in addition to reading the book), so I could get it read in time for book club. I recommend this audio book for any other book enthusiast. The story is wonderful and different, and fun to read or listen too (or both!).

Bernd Alexander Schmidt

ein perfekter Murakami

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on October 16, 2021

Verified Purchase

Auf deutsch schon zweimal gelesen, nach vielen Jahren nun mal auf englisch aufgefrischt,
einfach klasse, die ganzen großen Themen des großen kleinen Japaners sind hier mit drin,

für mich ist der Aufziehvogel zwar die Nummer1, aber Kafka ist nah dran!

Nun ist es zwar blöd, einen Japaner auf englisch zu lesen, aber bei Murakami nicht ganz:
Er schrieb oft zuerst auf englisch und hat dann ins Japanische zurück übersetzt, bevor er veröffentlichte,
dadurch auch dieser typische Schreibstil. Vielleicht ist man also auf englisch ganz nah am Autoren?

Außerdem sind die englischen Paperbacks meist sehr günstig und man tut was für sein eingerostetes Englisch.

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Not my cup of tea

Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on October 14, 2020

Verified Purchase

I came across this book quite by chance and decided to buy it on a whim. I've finished it right now, but I'm a bit confused. Maybe, as Nakata would say, I'm too dumb for this kind of book, but I don't like it. The two stars are for the writing style, which was really nice (at the beginning I couldn't put it down). But everything considered, I can't find a real meaning to this book. It's too complicated and I don't understand why everything (the entrance stone, the murdering) has happened. It seems as if the characters can't decide their life, and there are strong forces that guide them..
Maybe the only problem is that this is not my genre.

sunshine

Absolutely mesmerizing

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on March 10, 2019

Verified Purchase

I cannot recommend this book enough. It is truly wonderful, captivating masterpiece. It draws you in like a magnet. I cannot remember the last time I so much wished that the story would not be over. I just wanted to stay forever in this fascinating, thought - provoking world that Murakami has painted.

It is so sad that few people have nothing else to comment than about the size/volume etc. of this print. Don't be mislead, this is a perfect pocket - size book, very easy to carry with you and read everywhere.

This book is simply wonderful, don't doubt it. Just take a deep breath and dive into the world where people can talk to the cats and truck drivers suddenly discover Beethoven.

One person found this helpful

Sohail

Writing for the quality of the book bought from used section!

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on December 7, 2020

Verified Purchase

As an utter shock, it came as totally new, sealed in plastic wrap, though it is old 2005 edition! I guess they took it out from a cellar or old stock or something! Not even a scratch in the book!
Good Job to the seller!
Thanks

3 people found this helpful

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Buy new:

$15.94

FREE delivery: Thursday, Feb 9 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Ships from: Amazon.com

Sold by: Amazon.com

Buy used:

$11.52