Kafka on the Shore.

MURAKAMI, Haruki. Translated by Philip Gabriel.

ISBN 10: 1400043662 / ISBN 13: 9781400043668

Published by Alfred A. Knopf,, New York, 2005

About this Item

First U.S. edition / First printing. Blue paper-covered spine, ivory paper-covered boards. 436 pages. Fine in fine dust jacket. Winner of the 2006 Franz Kafka Prize. Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Novels in 2006. Number 78 on The New York Times Reader's list of the 100 best Books of the 21st Century. .

Seller Inventory # 18772

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Kafka on the Shore.
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf,, New York
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400043662
• ISBN 13: 9781400043668
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Weight: 3 pounds
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature
  • Japan
  • Alternative History

About this title

Synopsis

With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.

This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it 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. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. 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.

Extravagant in its accomplishment, Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s truly great storytellers at the height of his powers.

About the Author

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into thirty-four languages, and the most recent of his many honors is the Yomiuri Literary Prize, whose previous recipients include Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe.