Kafka on the Shore - (Vintage International) by Haruki Murakami (Paperback)

About the Book

Kafka Tamura runs away from home to escape his father's oedipal prophecy and to find his long-lost mother and sister. As Kafka flees, so too does Nakata, an elderly simpleton whose quiet life has been upset by a gruesome murder. High school & older.

Book Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the acclaimed author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and one of the world's greatest storytellers comes "an insistently metaphysical mind-bender" (The New Yorker) about a teenager on the run and a deceptively simple old man.

Now with a new introduction by the author.

Here we meet fifteen-year-old runaway Kafka Tamura and the elderly Nakata, who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, acclaimed author Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder, in what is a truly remarkable journey.

"As powerful as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.... Reading Murakami ... is a striking experience in consciousness expansion."--Chicago Tribune

Review Quotes

"As powerful as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.... Reading Murakami ... is a striking experience in consciousness expansion." --The Chicago Tribune

"An insistently metaphysical mind-bender."
--The New Yorker

"If he has not achieved that status already, Haruki Murakami is on course to becoming the most widely read Japanese writer outside Japan, past or present."
--The New York Times

About the Author

HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many honors is the Yomiuri Literary Prize, whose previous recipients include Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe.