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Kafka On The Shore
by Haruki Murakami


8.5

based on 29 reviews
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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

This surreal novel from the acclaimed Japanese novelist (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) focuses on two characters whose lives (as we eventually learn) are linked: a 15-year-old runaway in search of his mother and sister, and an elderly WWII veteran who can speak with cats.

Knopf, 448 pages
01/18/2005
$25.95

ISBN: 1400043662

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

NOTES:
Translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel.

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Kirkus Reviews

Murakami is of course himself an immensely reader-friendly novelist, and never has he offered more enticing fare than this enchantingly inventive tale. A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.

Publishers Weekly

By [the end], his readers, like his characters, will go just about anywhere Murakami wants them to, whether they "get" it or not.

Chicago Tribune Alan Cheuse

Reading Murakami, a world-class entertainer with a mysterious, metaphysical bent, is a striking experience in consciousness expansion. This new book, as powerful as "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and because of the plot design even a bit more accessible, is a fine place to begin exploring Murakami's world, which is our own, with a few major surprises.

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Charles Foran

How Murakami renders such a bewildering story so compelling, and so touching, is a testament to his genius. As always with his fiction, part of the exhilaration comes from the feeling that the author had no more idea of where he might be headed when he was writing the book than readers have while reading it.

The Independent James Urquhart

What a magnificently bewildering achievement Kafka on the Shore is. Brilliantly conceived, bold in its surreal scope, sexy, and driven by a snappy and often comical plot, Murakami's new work delves into the congested inner workings of our selves with characteristic brio.

The Independent Matt Thorne

Contains more than enough mystery to delight fans, and will also entrance newcomers... This novel is Murakami's most addictive fix to date.

Boston Globe Julie Wittes Schlack

Murakami's power to imagine is breathtaking and the empathy infusing Kafka on the Shore makes it a responsible book, one that is adult, wise, and forgiving.

New York Observer David Thomson

You can say that this book proceeds by cross-cutting, going from one story to another, but then you have to account for the reader being as hooked as surely as if he were reading Agatha Christie or Hemingway, where the story is meant to go straight and taut like a fishing line with a trout on the hook.

Washington Post Steven Moore

Murakami's spin on this theme and the Oedipus myth is daringly original and compulsively readable, enabled by Philip Gabriel's wonderfully fluent translation. Kafka on the Shore is warmly recommended; read it to your cat.

The New York Times Book Review Laura Miller

While anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves.

Atlantic Monthly Jon Zobenica

This meta-fictional fun house isn't perfect, but underpinning it all is a surprisingly patient, deeply affecting meditation on perfection itself, specifically romantic perfection—the obsessive greed in pursuing it, the selfish isolation that comes from achieving it, the soul-killing (and also selfish) grief of outliving it, of being left, inevitably, with nothing but its fading memory.

Review Of Contemporary Fiction Steven G. Kellman

A beguiling romp. A bildungsroman written while Murakami was translating The Catcher in the Rye into Japanese, it proffers wisdom but at least delivers what a character calls "a lifetime of weird stuff packed into ten days."

The Observer Catherine Humble

Laden with philosophical overtones and enchanting wit, Murakami's story is at once childishly magical and astoundingly wise.

The New York Times Janet Maslin

However vague its allusions and overbearing its pretensions, however needlessly jive its English translation ("Jeez Louise"), this book makes for a beguiling and enveloping experience.

LA Weekly Sarah Chung

Nakata is perhaps Murakami’s most heartbreakingly pathetic creation.

San Francisco Chronicle Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Though Kafka on the Shore features scenes and characters, like Nakata, as marvelous as anything Murakami's written, the book as a whole is problematic: Its predicament is that in trying to be both kinds of Murakami novel, it manages to be neither.

The Onion A.V. Club Scott Tobias

Like the best of his work, Kafka On The Shore makes the eccentric seem transcendent, supplying his wayward narrative with one resonant image and encounter after another.

Los Angeles Times Richard Eder

Murakami's novel, though wearying at times and confusing at others, has the faintly absurd loft of some great festive balloon. He addresses the fantastic and the natural, each with the same mix of gravity and lightness.

Salon Charles Taylor

I loved reading Kafka on the Shore. The book may not, finally, add up (or not to anything deep), but it never feels hackneyed. Murakami has written a novel where the fantastic is trite and the everyday is profound.

The Spectator Philip Hensher

Works a powerful spell, its extremes of violence and sexual encounter drifting across its surface like a painless dream. Although there is a recurrent sense of unreality, what keeps the reader firmly attached to the demented flood of events is the certainty that there is a solid reality, however oddly expressed, at its heart.

Village Voice Paul Lafarge

As Oshima says, "[A] certain type of perfection can be realized only through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect." This is a clunker too, but it's delivered by a hermaphrodite who is driving a 15-year-old boy named Kafka to his mountain hideout, discussing Schubert all the while. The forest is rescued by the trees.

The New Yorker John Updike

A real page-turner, as well as an insistently metaphysical mind-bender. Spun out to four hundred and thirty-six pages, it seems more gripping than it has a right to be and less moving, perhaps, than the author wanted it to be.

The Guardian Tim Adams

The fun and drama of Murakami's storytelling is that you are never quite certain where those dreams end and where reality begins. His singular skill as a novelist lies in creating hallucinatory landscapes in which everything has an internal logic and much has the cool erotic intensity of fantasy.

The Guardian David Mitchell

I think it is fair to say that Kafka on the Shore is not one of Murakami's masterpieces..., but it is an inventive, alluring, striving novel, and would that more writers in translation hope to find such a large and hungry audience. Respect is due.

Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese

Like a dream, you just have to be there. And like a dream, what this dazzling novel means - or whether it means anything at all - we may never know.

Booklist Allison Block

Murakami's literary high-wire acts have earned him both boos and ahs from connoisseurs of contemporary fiction. What side you come down on depends on your predilection for the perverse. [15 Nov 2004, p.532]

Daily Telegraph Christopher Tayler

It will leave his long-term fans feeling slightly disappointed.

Daily Telegraph Theo Tait

It has kookiness to burn, then; but it lacks depth and originality... Despite flashes of the old genius, this gift too frequently fails him in Kafka on the Shore. What remains has the pat credulity and the kitschy mysticism of urban myth.

Sydney Morning Herald Michelle Griffin

The novel's wilful disregard for any kind of coherence, its many trite little lectures on artistic refinement, even the interchangeable voices of many of the characters, are flaws that nag and test the reader all the way through.

The average user rating for this book is 8.5 (out of 10) based on 50 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

charles k gave it a9:
surreal yet logical. the coincidence of humanity relates all of us.

Becca L gave it a10:
This was the first and only Murakami book I've ever read. It was recommended to me by a friend and I must say, I think it is one of the greatest books I've ever read. As you're reading it it seems as if it's just another story, but with greater descriptions. There is one point though, where everything in the story clicks. That's what makes this such a good book. It goes from a simple story to this deeper meaning, philisophical blend of description and knowledge. It's absoluetly amazing and I am planning on reading it again soon.

Dan B. gave it a3:
It's not a horrible book, but it's simply not worth it, for the length. If it were half the length, perhaps. But my edition (UK mass paperback) was 600+, and a book's got to be really, really good, to justify that sort of length. Nothing in this book justifies itself. Furthermore, the prose is vague, and lazy. The scenes are all bloated. The conversations are also bloated. I've read quite a few Murakami books and stories before, and have had mixed but positive reactions to them. This, though, is my last. It's like he doesn't even try to write well, tightly, or coherently. And you can call that artistry, if you want, but I think it's just laziness. He ought to have spent another month or four on this book, cutting the fat. If he can't be bothered, then why should the reader bother?

phyllis w gave it a10:
A compelling, humanistic dream-like make-over of Oedipus Rex with the Sopheclean wisdom that ambiguity brings. The cat whisperer, truck driver plot brings in the stuff of magic that incomprehensible reality is made from.

C S gave it a10:
Something about the book drew me in and kept me there. People's complaints seem to be of excessive mysticism... think a little deeper and pay closer attention to the connections between everything in the novel. If one does this then the hidden thoughts and beliefs come forth illustrating an interesting and complex idea of themes in today's society, about today's world, and the human soul among many others. I enjoy making conclusions for myself, and not being led by the hand through plots and thematic ideologies, Murakami definitely makes sure to allow the reader the space to use their imagination while still guiding them through his own ideas and thoughts. Overall an amazing book, read it closely or a second time and you shall love it all the more. P.S. Murakami leaves the reader asking many question about themselves and their surroundings after reading any of his novels, often these may make one feel partially uncomfortable with the honesty with which the reader feels compelled to answer.

Jack M gave it a9:
surreal, sexy, substantial, this novel seeps through the psyche like espresso.

Matt S gave it a10:
excellent

Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami

Kafka On The Shore
by Haruki Murakami