Haruki Murakami is one of only a handful of authors out there who’s work I consider worthy of elevation into the heady realms of genius. I happened across his stuff earlier this year when this book, Kafka on the Shore called out to me from the library shelf. Immediately upon completion of this book I set out to read everything I could get my hands on by Murakami. I’ve since read all of his books save one, and only two of them were less than great.
Kafka on the Shore is brilliant, it’s mind-boggling. This is the kind of book that sticks with you, haunts you a little bit. Until I let the work marinate in my mind I wasn’t certain if it was in fact a work of genius or just exceptionally weird, having let it stew for awhile, and having read another six books by him, my vote is now firmly in the genius catagory.
Title: Kafka on the Shore
Author: Haruki Murakami
LC Rating:
Two main characters here, but they never meet, and their stories intertwine in unexpected ways. One of them is Kafka, a young man who is running away from home and finding himself involved with a host of characters who push him out into adventures on the fringe of reality, and dynamically changing his world-view. The other main character is completely static, but every character he comes into contact with is forced into dynamic growth.
The best part about Murakami is that while he explores ideas that involve philosophy, psychology and the occult, he never gets didactic. Instead he sort of sets up the fundaments of the idea, expressing them to the point where you expect him to climb up on some sort of podium and start lecturing about various aspects of what it means to be a human… and then he doesn’t, he just lets the almost expressed taint the pages. This particular technique is used to great effect in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but there’s a hefty dose of it here too.
But I should let him speak for himself… this was my favorite quote out of Kafka on the Shore…
“I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of- that a certain kind of perfection can only be acheived through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect, and personally I find that encouraging.”
Dunno ’bout you, but damn, I find that brilliant. This right here is one hell of a good read.