When he awakes several weeks later, his memory has been erased and his mental development is forever stalled. All except Satoru Nakata, who is transferred to a Tokyo hospital. Within a few hours, all the children are awake and seemingly unaffected by their experience. After the appearance of an unidentified silver object in the sky, the sixteen children fall into a trance-like state. A teacher describes to her interviewer taking her class on a mushroom-picking trip to the countryside.

Imbricated with the chapters describing Kafka’s flight is a parallel story that begins with a classified US Military report on a UFO incident that occurred in rural Japan during World War Two. Led by instinct he travels to the city of Takamatsu on the island of Shikoku, where he eventually finds refuge in a library overseen by the epicene Oshima and the beautiful but ineffably sad Ms Saeki. And his father, whom we never met (or do we?), is an egotistical, world-famous sculptor who has never shown his son affection. Kafka certainly needs all the fortitude he can find – his mother and sister deserted him when he was four years old. Crow urges Kafka to be strong, to become the toughest 15-year-old in the world.

In the opening chapter we have the self-named Kafka Tamura talking about running away from home with what we assume is his alter ego, Crow. This magical calmness extends to readers, who begin to accept the oddest of developments with a docile smile.ĭespite its prodigious length (weighing in at over 500 pages), there is little space in Murakami?s new novel, Kafka on the Shore, to establish his protagonist’s normality before plunging him into the extraordinary.

Grounded in the everyday, his characters experience the strangest events with the equanimity of dreamers. This mixture of the mundane and the outlandish made what is perhaps his greatest work, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, so beguiling. The characters may well eat pasta and whistle along to Italian arias but they also sit at the bottom of a well for days on end and can converse with cats. Haruki Murakami, a superstar author in his native country, ratchets up the disconnect in his fictional Japan. The illuminated symbols of global brands rub shoulders with signs and gadgets whose purpose seems unfathomable. The stereotypical reaction of Occidental visitors to Japan is disorientation – a response prompted not just by the strangeness of an alien culture but by the uncanny mix of the familiar and the superficially bizarre.

Satoru nakata kafka on the shore