About this title: Kafka Tamura lives with his father in Tokyo, but at 15 he takes to the road, hoping to locate his mother and his sister, who left when he was four. Meanwhile, an elderly and possibly retarded man named Nakata, who survived a mysterious (and still unexplained) event many years ago, is able to talk to cats. These two story lines converge in Haruki ...
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Description: Very Good. 1400079276 Very good condition, minor wear. Minor shelf wear on edges and corners. Some scuffing. No other major marks or damage. Paperback. 100% satisfaction guaranteed. Great customer service and a no problem, EZ return policy. Real people, real service, since 1981. read more
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9781400079278ISBN:1400079276
Description: Very Good- No creases in spine no slant, edgewear, firm binding, 467 clean unmarked pages, Very Good Minus condition, translated by Philip Gabriel from the Japanese. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2006-01-03
ISBN-13:9781400079278ISBN:1400079276
Description: Good. Mild shelf and corner wear; Mild spine bow; Minor tanning and mild soling to page edges; Mild rubbing and wear to covers and spine; Small stain spot on bottom page edges by spine; ** Free USPS tracking and confirm on US orders ** read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9781400043668ISBN:1400043662
Description: Very Good in Good jacket. This book is in very good condition. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The dust jacket is in good condition with bumps, scuffs and edge chips. read more
Edition: Tenth Printing
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage, New York
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9781400079278ISBN:1400079276
Description: Very Good. 1400079276. The unlikely alliance between Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway, and the aging Nakata, a man who has never recovered from a wartime affliction, brings dramatic changes to both characters as they embark on a surreal odyssey through a strange, sometimes violent, sometimes fantastical world.; 467 pages. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. 1400079276 Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780739455418ISBN:0739455419
Description: Very Good. Light read copy, no creases in spine, no slant, light edgewear, tight binding, 408 unmarked and clean pages, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, highly regarded writer. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780099458326ISBN:0099458322
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Description: Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket. Hardcover. Knopf, 2005. 8th Printing. Near Fine Book in Near Fine Dust Jacket. Price Intact. Light shelf wear to Book and Jacket. Light scratches on DJ. Overall, a clean and tight copy to add to a collection or read and enjoy. Dust Jacket protected with a new archival cover. Bubble wrapped and shipped promptly in a box. read more
Edition: NEW ED
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: VINTAGE Country = UNITED KINGDOM
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780099458326ISBN:0099458322
Description: BRAND NEW PAPERBACK. 512 pages. (512 pages) kafka tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. the aging nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. this book follows the fortunes of two remarkable characters. edition new ed (Paperback) read more
Edition: First edition. Advance Reader's Edition
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780099494096ISBN:0099494094
Description: Fine. No dust jacket as issued. Slight wear at corners. 435 p. 24 cm. Glued binding. Kafka Tamura lives with his father in Tokyo, but at 15 he takes to the road, hoping to locate his mother and his sister, who left when he was four. Meanwhile, an elderly and possibly retarded man named Nakata, who survived a mysterious (and still unexplained) event many years earlier, is able to talk to cats. These two story lines converge in Haruki Murakami's seventh novel, a winsomely odd tale full of ... read more
"I really disliked this book. It in fact made me angry to read it or sometimes to even think about reading it. It started off with an interesting premise and interesting characters (which is why it got two stars), but about midway through I thought it all spiraled apart into ridiculousness. I know this book falls into the magical realism genre, in which I know who just need to suspend your disbelief, which I can do, but only if I feel like the magical elements in the book have a meaning and contribute to the story, not if they are just thrown in there to be surreal. There were so many elements in this book that were just plain weird...for example, Johnnie Walker (the whisky guy) who killed cats and collected their souls to make a magic flute (this was just one scene, it never really came back to connect to the story), fish and leeches raining from the sky, and Colonel Sanders (the KFC guy) also made an appearance and set one of the characters up with a prostitute. And then there were weird realtionships between the characters of the 15 year old main character sleeping with (maybe) his 50 year old mother. It's all so odd and I felt like I never understood any of the characters or the meaning of all of this random stuff. And then there would be random annoying many-pages-long philosophical statements from a character or desciptions of classical music that just were so boring and unconnected to the rest of the story and seemed completely out of place. So I definitely would not recommend this book. The only reason I even finished it was because it was the book for my book club that I just joined. And that's another reason it got two stars instead of one - some of the parts of the book were interesting to talk about to other people."
By erry,
Jakarta, Balikpapan, Banjarmasin, Palangkaraya. Mo
"The drowning girl's finger Search for the entrance stone, and more Lifting the hem of her azure dress, She gazes At kafka on the shore
At beginning, reading this book just like we read two different and not connected stories. It's about Kafka, a 15 years old boy who runs away from home either to escape from a gruesome oedipal prophecy and 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 towards something for reasons that, like the most basic activities of his daily life, he can't fathom.
Try to escape from his former life, try to escape from his father curse. Kafka go to wherever as far as he could. Without any place to go, without any relatives he knew and without any plan what will he do next. After take some travel days, kafka comes to takamatsu city. and stay at a private library.
In the other part of this story, after a murderer of a cat stalker called Johny Walker, Nakata started his jouney towards something he can't describe. With help from many people, nakata continue his journey until he meets Hoshino, a middle twenty years old truck driver who drove him until Tokyo and then accompany him to Takamatsu.
The two uncorrelated seem stories came to have connected step by step. As their paths converge and the reasons for that convergences become clear. What and whose Nakata search for and what the reasons for that. And what's the correlation between Kafka and Nakata's jouney.
Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats can talk, fish fall from the sky, and the spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or to commit murder. There's just very thin border between reality and illusion or dream. This is unpredictable stories, just like Murakami's. Some part of this story takes me to the other worlds, and I could imagine a place where no ages and no time.
At the end, it comes to the conclusion "In everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That's how we survive."
"Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there-to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.""
"David and Damon, thanks so much for introducing me to this new-to-me writer. I loved this book. There were so many layers to this book, like a delicious layer cake that you can peel off one by one. David and I want Tasha and Tris to finish reading this so we can discuss on the group site. If we don't do it soon, I'll have forgotten all about Kafka, Madame Seta, Nakata, the cabin in the woods, and the stone."
For some reason I keep being drawn back to Murakami. With each new book that I read, I find myself wanting to like him more than I ever really do. I'm pretty sure I only started reading him after having read a couple of David Mitchell books. I think my problem is that I went looking for the Murakami that David Mitchell was emulating (or the Murakami to whom Mitchell was paying tribute) and apart from a few allusions that I now understand, I don't think I've found him yet. That's not to say that I don't enjoy reading his books; I enjoy them for the most part but I definitely don't love them. I think my favorite so far is SPUTNIK SWEETHEART the first book of his that I read (a couple books ago) which felt a little like parts of THE MAGUS and LE GRAND MEAULNES.
I guess I enjoyed KAFKA ON THE SHORE in the end, even if I found it mostly frustrating. There were a number of things (not just dialogue) that really bothered me for the first three-quarters of the book. After that, I was able to let it go a little...I'd like to give the author the benefit of the doubt and blame the translator/translation quality...but I'm skeptical.
In response to the Kafka question: I don't think there's anything wrong with liking Kafka. I haven't read anything that recently (I reread THE CASTLE a year or two ago) so this commentary might not be too accurate. I'm not 100% sure how relate this book to Kafka. Kafka is clearly one (of many)influences for Murakami (SPUTNIK SWEETHEART had a character named "K"). The narrator tells us that Kafka means crow...and the Kafka in this book has a sort of imaginary counterpart named crow (who becomes a crow at one point...possibly in a dream(?)). But other than that, this didn't feel too much like Kafka (even, I suspect, where it was supposed to). What I like about the surreal or magical-realistic aspect of Kafka is that it's so grounded in reality, all of the details have been so thoroughly researched, that it feels real. But with Murakami, the surreal episodes feel like they've just been plunked in, on a whim and there's so many of them that don't seem at all related. Compared to THE METAMORPHASIS, the deus ex machinae of the fish and leeches falling from the sky (which as far as I can tell was never explained except by saying that one of the characters "made it happen") seems like just that...an easy out...a means of not having to explain or resolve plot holes or allow the story to progress organically.
It doesn't bother me that the Nakata character talks with cats...but does the dialogue have to be so bad (even with the character being mentally challenged)? And then there was the whole Johnny Walker, Colonel Sanders thing; which I guess could have been some sort of critique of western export...consumer culture or whatever which would have been fine)...but all I could think of was Murakami with writer's block over a half-eaten bucket of popcorn chicken and half-empty bottle of scotch trying to come up with something useful. Oh, I almost forgot the description of sex in his books that always seems so creepy, cold and generally off-putting.
To his credit: one of my favorite parts of the book was where the boy goes to the cabin in the woods and then on to the utopian limbo...I feel like I've read a lot of things like this lately that did what HM was trying to do (only better) but this was still good...and this section did feel intentional and deliberate...(and I guess just a little bit like an episode of Lost). Also, I should probably mention that I liked his essay on running in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago.
Sorry this review might be worse than before, but I don't have time (or probably the capacity) to make it any better."
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