Like the best of magical realism, fantasy elements are spliced into everyday settings as if they fully belonged there. It’s a story about loss, and about being lost, but it’s never maudlin even in its most profound moments, and is often quite funny.

Kafka in the Shore is 460 pages of dreamlike bliss. He weaves slipstream fiction in a manner that cuts to the heart of his characters’ deepest emotional conflicts, all the while avoiding pretention or bathos. Murakami is one of the world’s truly extraordinary storytellers. Happily for me, and now for you, that lack has been addressed. in 2005, not won the World Fantasy Award in 2006 - an award I consider among the more reputable in the field, in that it’s willing to risk going far afield for its candidates, and embraces world literature in a way the Hugos and Nebulas usually don’t - then I’d never have made the discovery of Haruki Murakami, and my life would be thus bereft. Had Kafka on the Shore, released in the U.S. (Or, more to the point, the genre’s boundaries as the publishing industry defines them.) The books that publishers send you pile up so fast that reading anything else seems like an irresponsible luxury. One of the hazards of being a full-time fantasy and SF critic is that your reading schedule often doesn’t allow for work outside the genre. Share book reviews and ratings with Thomas, and even join a book club on Goodreads.

Book cover artwork is copyrighted by its respective artist and/or publisher. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle-yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.All reviews and site design © by Thomas M. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prost itute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Kafka on the Shore, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom.

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