I have been putting off this blog in order to try and decide what I really think about Kafka on the Shore ... and even though it's a week since I finished it, I'm still debating it in my head. This, I suspect, is a good sign, in that the book is certainly staying with me ... unlike some others I could mention! It is certainly a novel that makes the reader work hard, REALLY hard. Set in present day Japan, we think we are journeying with 15-year-old Kafka Tamura, who is in the act of running away from home where he has been miserable and unloved by everyone, especially his father. But then, we come across the reporting of, and investigation into, a school outing during the 2nd World War, where a class of young children fall unconscious in the forest on a field trip. Mysteriously, all of whom wake up unharmed except for one boy whose life will never be the same again. We switch back to the present and follow the progress of Kafka as he tries to find his sister and mother who left when he was four, and about whom his father has made a terrible prophesy. Alongside this, we meet Nakata, an old man who is not very bright but who can speak to cats, and uses this unusual ability to make a little bit of money finding lost cats for their owners. Nakata, it turns out, is the boy from the forest. The lives of these two characters becomes intertwined, although they never actually meet. Will Kafka find his mother and sister, and if so, can he stop the prophesy from coming true ... but more worryingly, does he want to stop it from coming true? Haruki Murakami has created magical passages that are a joy to read - I particularly loved Nakata and all that he did. However, there are also sections that are tough going in terms of both subject matter and style. There are sequences of philosophical meanderings that I sometimes felt were a bit laborious, but then anyone who has been reading these blogs knows I'm an action-oriented girl at heart! And while I wanted to root for Kafka, and I often did, I also wanted to slap him, and slap him hard! I could not quite believe some of the things he did and it left me disappointed on the odd occasion. As the book progresses, it becomes increasingly surreal and if you fight this, you may become both disorientated and disgruntled. I very nearly did, but made a conscious decision to let myself go with the flow to see where we ended up. My personal preference would have been for a more definitive ending ... but maybe that is why the book has stayed with me, as I ponder what happened next to the characters that I had invested such a long time with. Certainly a challenging book, but worth the effort.
My STAR rating: FOUR.
Length: 505 print pages.
Price I paid: £5.99.
Formats available: print; unabridged audio download; ebook.
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