Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami

Aug 2013 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Sean Barrett and Oliver Le Sueur

About this audiobook

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.

Ratings and reviews

I loved this book! The imagery that Murakami creates is breath taking. His depth of world is immense, and the characters are well developed throughout the story. This book encourages on self reflection on the part of the reader. If you're into riddles, you'll enjoy the book's deep layering of themes and symbols. Warning: This book can be very sexually graphic at times, as well as violent. You might not enjoy a the book if you don't like it when things are wrapped up neatly at the end, or if you like to have all your questions answered. That said, I've heard it takes more than one read to get the full picture, so keep that in mind. The readers on this book were absolutely excellent, and have beautiful and soothing voices.

About the author

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than forty 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.