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. 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. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. 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. This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader.

That's what this storm's all about.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. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.Īnd once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.Īnd you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones.

There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. 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, and walk through it, step by step. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you.

Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn.

You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. “Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions.

Kafka on the shore online