His fiction has polarized literary critics and the reading public. Growing up in Kobe before moving to Tokyo to attend Waseda University, he published his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) after working as the owner of a small jazz bar for seven years. His novels, essays, and short stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the World Fantasy Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize. Haruki Murakami ( Murakami Haruki, born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer. Like a raft floating along with the river, not being bothered by anything that comes it's way, Nakata, I felt had a somewhat similar persona.Īlthough at the start of the book, the characters seem to be on their own journeys, their paths, however, intertwine at the end of the novel for an intriguing and hyper-surrealist ending.

He is as empty as a blank sheet, with no judgements, opinions or attachments with anything.

He is an elderly man who lived most of his life in solitude, without any particular purpose. Nakata, on the other hand, seems to have a different take on life than Kafka has. As one reads along with the book, they come across the different experiences of love, loss, joy and melancholy that the boy discovers along his journey. He constantly looks at his past and wonders if his future has already been determined. Kafka’s journey represents the overwhelming sense of sadness and the inner turmoil that has been scarred on him because of his miserable and dark past. The book is structured around two parallel stories of a 15- year-old boy Kafka Tamura, who, in an attempt to escape from his tyrannical father and an awful family curse, runs away from his home and an old Japanese man, Satoru Nakata, who after awakening from coma somehow gets a knack of talking to cats!

Published in Japanese in 2002, Kafka is an epic literary puzzle filled with uncanny episodes, magical worlds and hidden histories of Japan.

Genre- Mystical Realism, Fantasy, Suspense. In the words of John Updike, one of the greatest American novelists, ‘It is a real page-turner, as well as an insistently metaphysical mind-bender.’ Kafka on the shore is one of the most popular and intriguing novels written by Haruki Murakami.

Satoru nakata kafka on the shore