Kafka on the Shore

I've just added a new book to my list. Kafka on the Shore is a contemporary novel with strong elements of myth and Campbell's heroic voyage. A marvellously subtle piece that has Western structure, but Japanese sensibilities. This is the first Haruki Murakami novel I've read, but I'll certainly be getting my hands on more of his work. His writing has a quirkiness that blew through me like a breeze.

Murakami is Japan's Franz Kafka, but with an ease and optimism all his own: Kafka on the Shore is an existential 'whodunnit', a tale which questions our perceptions of what is real and what isn't, our relationships with the present and the past and what it means to be alive. It's full of tangents and asides, wonderful digressions onto topics as diverse as music, film and philosophy--Murakami is apparently fond of music, and musical motifs feature pretty heavily in all his works; in fact, his website list all the music referred to in his writings, which probably says more about him than any blurb I could write--but everything remains connected and relevant. Reading it felt like solving a riddle or traversing a maze; every corner seems richly complex and yet undeniably part of a whole.

Get it and read it, and fall into the world of the boy named 'Crow'.