Murakami is an aficionado of the drowsy interstices of everyday life, reality's cul-de-sacs, places so filled with the nothing that happens in them that they become uncanny … The author achieves this effect by doing everything wrong … Clichés, the ephemera of pop culture, characters who proclaim their thematic function -- these sound like the gambits of postmodernism, tricks meant to distance the reader from the artificiality of narrative and the sort of tactic that gets a novel labeled 'cerebral.' But Kafka on the Shore...doesn't feel distant or artificial. Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers. So great is the force of the author's imagination, and of his conviction in the archaic power of the story he is telling, that all this junk is made genuine.
A novel that is intellectually profound but feels ‘like an Indiana Jones movie or something’ … On one level, the novel is about a 15-year-old boy's rite of passage into the adult world, but on a larger level it's a meditation on Plato's notion...that each of us is looking for a soul mate to complete us … Murakami's spin on this theme and the Oedipus myth is daringly original and compulsively readable … Kafka on the Shore is an excellent demonstration of why he's deservedly famous.
Gay and severe, tender and horrifying...an archetypal coming-of-age quest … In most fiction, these would be psychic wounds worked out in roughly naturalistic fashion; here they come to life like the chess pieces over which Lewis Carroll's Alice falls asleep. Instead of the analyst's couch, Murakami deals with them in the living ferocity of the Sophoclean tragedy from which Freud derived his dead metaphor. Kafka's Oedipus complex is fought in the jousting pit, where most of the action takes place … 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.
A real page-turner, as well as an insistently metaphysical mind-bender … We often cannot imagine, while reading Kafka on the Shore, what will come next, and our suspicion...is that the author did not always know, either … The double plot unfolds in cunningly but tenuously linked chapters. There is violence, comedy, sex—deep, transcendental, anatomically correct sex, oral and otherwise—and a bewildering overflow of possible meanings … The novel’s two heroes interact only in the realm of kami. Of their entwined narratives, the story of Kafka Tamura is more problematic, more curiously overloaded, than that of the holy fool Nakata, with its familiar elements of science fiction, quest, and ebullient heroics.
Kafka on the Shore is as layered and convoluted as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is still the author's most drop-dead feat of pyrotechnics. But the new book is more ambitious in ways that render it more vague … The book's only conventional aspect is its uninspired cross-cutting format. This novel makes pendulum swings between the story of how Kafka runs away from home, and how good-hearted old Nakata, the cat whisperer, embarks on a peculiar quest. Kafka and Nakata are not acquainted, but their lives overlap in piquant, spooky ways … Kafka on the Shore specializes in overlapping metaphors and symbols that may or may not have any true connection...It's clear that they are powerful but less clear that they are deep.
Mann, Camus, Borges, Garcia Marquez--an ethereal crowd with which to associate any contemporary writer, and of course amazingly difficult to compare with. But Murakami can stand the heat … Murakami's main characters always suggest a Westernized sensibility, and Kafka Tamura is no different, with his references to the music of the Beatles and Radiohead, the poetry of W.B. Yeats and Federico Garcia Lorca, the fiction of Ernest Hemingway and the movies of Ingrid Bergman. But he also is obviously thoroughly Japanese in his declared affinities and fascination with the fiction of Lady Murasaki, Natsume Soseki and other native writers, and with his straight-forward description of sexual encounters...and the reality of ghosts … It's not just international borders that this novel straddles. Given the seeming miracles wrought by the older Nakata and the sexual adventures of our young hero, the novel crosses other lines of demarcation with respect to reality and mores. And ultimately it dares to ignore the boundaries imposed by the relations between individual consciousness and the world.
In some respects this book is a primer on existentialism, but in Murakami's capable hands, weighty philosophical matters are unpretentiously filtered down to a simple, poignant question posed by a boy who was abandoned by his mother, a man-child without moorings, who wonders, ‘All I know is that I'm totally alone . . . Is this what it means to be free?’ … 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.
Murakami creates openings into alternate universes. Sardines and mackerel rain down from the skies; brand names like Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker walk the streets as living spirits. Erotic ghosts, or real women reliving past memories, come to you in waking dreams. Much of the time you really have no idea where Murakami is taking you, but you buy into the surrealism and odd mysterious beauty … Kafka on the Shore is an epic metaphysical mystery that is firmly grounded in a modern post-industrial Japan. But Kafka and Nakata follow visions that are from an older Japan, a world of animism and fate. It is this psychic tension between the ancient and the new that keeps us hooked into the dual narratives.
Murakami has now given us Kafka on the Shore, an epic work that blends the sprawling designs of Wind-Up Bird with the psychological ruminations of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the emotional sensitivity of Norwegian Wood. It thus presents itself as the most ambitious and lucid account thus far of Murakami's wide-ranging and deftly entwined thematic concerns … Murakami's novels tend to fall into two camps: the antic tragicomedy and the coming-of-age-inflected tender love story … 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.
