Running concurrently with Kafka’s story is that of the elderly Satoru Nakata. But being a bookish teenager, he winds up staying in a library in Takamatsu where his life becomes ever-stranger. He packs a bag, takes a bus out of Tokyo and embarks on a quest to find his mother and sister. When his father warns him of a prophecy that Kafka will kill his father and sleep with both his mother and sister – a fate even worse than that of the tragic Oedipus of Greek mythology – Kafka decides to run away from home. The protagonist is fifteen year-old Kafka Tamura – or so he calls himself. Murakami’s work skirts into magic realism – where the real world has connections to the realm of the fantastical. Now receiving a luxury release from The Folio Society with colour illustrations by Daniel Liévano, it’s the perfect time to explore this quite extraordinary title. I worked as a bookseller at the time, and the title was always well-stocked and flew off the shelves. His 2002 novel ‘Kafka on the Shore’ was critically acclaimed on its release, and it received an English translation in 2005. Japanese writer Haruki Murakami is one of those celebrated authors of modern classics that everybody should get around to at least once in a lifetime.
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