author: Haruki Murakami

name: Steev

average rating: 4.06

book published: 2002

rating: 4

read at: 2009/11/16

date added: 2009/11/17

shelves: novels, fun, own-it

review:
Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite novelists, although at some point I stopped reading him when his work went from the wonderfully surreal and bizarre to more staid and slow tales of middleclass mid-life crisis. However, this book, one of his more recent, returns to the fantastic embedded in the real. In fact, reading this book makes me realize that Murakami's work is sort of like a Japanese version of magical realism. A mostly "normal" world, but peppered with never-explained strangeness. No science-fiction rationale, like the director's cut of Donnie Darko giving us a quantum-physics way to believe the insanity, ever ruins the delicate ambient wonder. And with Kafka on the Shore there's even a somewhat happy ending. The disparate threads and subplots come almost together, though still never totally neatly or with logical explanations, and the eponymous teenage hero gets to go home, wiser, and perhaps somewhat more content.