this is for you, Tristan

My husband and son gave me a little gift for Mother's Day yesterday: they gave me the chance to finish "Kafka on the Shore." (You know, if I remember my English grammer correctly, the title of a book should be underlined, not in quotation marks. But this is the internet, right? All rules are off. Plus it doesn't give you an underline function.) At any rate, here's the book report. It like that term better than "critique." I did book reports in elementary school, and book reports were much kinder and gentler than the crits I had to endure in grad school!

This is an amazing book. Maybe not for the person who likes everything tied up all neat and tidy, because Murakami doesn't do that, exactly. But he has the incredible ability to make utterly impossible situations seem completely reasonable, so you have no trouble believing that a character could have a conversation with a cat, or that Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders could be living incarnations of "good" and "evil" who can influence events.

"Kafka on the Shore" explores ideas about identity and the subconscious, space/time continuum, paranormal events, irony and Oedipus Rex. There are more ideas at work in this book than in anything that I've read in a long time. But don't let that put you off -- even if you're not into Kafka and Hegel and Freud you can still read this book and enjoy it. The complete absurdity of some of the plot developments is entertaining, but nothing is mere embellishment.

The hero of the story is Kafka, a 15-year-old runaway who was abandoned by his mother when he was four years old. This event poisoned his relationship with his father and left him feeling "hollow" and arrested in time. He leaves home searching for a remedy to his disjointed life and finds a soul-mate at the edge of the world.

A parallel plot line involves Mr. Nakata who has been "not terribly bright" since an otherworldly incident 60 years ago left him unable to read or write. Mr. Nakata's and Kafka's fates are inextricably intertwined, although for a long time you can't figure out the connection. They go on a journey into and out of reality as we know it and their destination is ultimately ambiguous.

Haruki Murakami has populated this book with fascinating characters and lots and lots of information. Even his working class characters are pretty erudite -- they make the "Desperate Housewives" all look like Boopsies. And as I said earlier, nothing in this book is superfluous. I probably missed some of the tie-ins between ideas and events. But Murakami knows his dramaturgy. As one of his characters points out, "Anton Chekhov put it best when he said, 'If a pistol appears in a story, eventually it's got to be fired.'" Murakami doesn't leave his guns unfired.