Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

Nowadays, when the reader is flooded by an enormous number of books every day, is hard to tell a good piece of story from boring time killer. Haruki Murakami`s novels for sure are ones that a brilliant modern writer could have created. Kafka on the Shore is a very successful novel not only in Japan, where the writer comes from, but already translated in over one hundred languages.

One of the two central characters, the young Nakata, looses consciousness during a school trip to the forest, like all of his classmates. After a while all of them regain consciousness except Nakata, who spends few months in hospital and after coma remains mentally disadvantaged.

But he receives the ability to talk to cats, which in his later life, except humble subsidy from governor of Tokyo, gives him extra money from tracking lost cats. One ordinary day, he is taken by an eerie dog to a house of a man looking like Johnie Walker and finds out that this man is collecting cats` souls to build the most powerful flute. Not being able to look at Johnie Walker killing cats one by one Nakata stabs him with a knife and leaves Tokyo. His journey to accomplish a very important task just begins. From this moment his life changes drastically and nothing is how it seems to be anymore.

Lots of coincidental and unpredictable events put the 15 years old Kafka Tamura on the gripping way to unravel who his mother is and why she has left him with his sister 11 years ago. A legendary curse is put on him by his father, who doesn’t know any other way how to revenge, that he has to kill his father and sleep with mother and sister, according to the ancient Greek myth of Edype. After few days after his escape in Tokyo it turns out that his father, a famous sculptor, has been stabbed till death at his place at night.

A beautiful story of love, of questions, of what life really means, of completing each own history, written with reflective and brilliant language in respect of old legends and beliefs. Can be a wonderful and imaginative journey for everyone who accepts miracles and believes that the weirdest things happen to the most ordinary people.