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“Summer is reading time, isn't it? Bookstores put out entire tables devoted
exclusively to items deemed somehow appropriate for the season. And we, we readers, anticipate long evenings, the sun happy to oblige with light until
late into the night. I've always loved hot, sultry evenings filled with books; I remember the hours when, as a child, I’d climb the red-bud tree in our front yard, big heart-shaped leaves hiding me from the neighborhood kids playing kick-the-can in the street, a book clutched in my hand as I scrambled up, bare feet and single handedly. Sometimes I'd get called away, lured, perhaps, into the antics of the games in the street, and I'd forget and leave my book up there. I'd find it, the next morning, folded open where I'd stopped the night before, pages slightly soggy with the hint of damp from its night outdoors. I'd find it still there in the morning; I read hundreds of books each summer in that
tree.
I no longer average hundreds of books per summer, but I'm still committed to
reading. The highlight this summer was Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. Murakami, a contemporary Japanese writer, gives us a wild surrealist novel which focuses primarily on a young protagonist, Kafka Tamura, a thoughtful and prepossessing high schooler who’s run away from home both to get away from a mysterious danger, and to search for a mother and sister who disappeared years ago. The chapters alternate between Kafka’s wanderings and those of Nakata, a gentle misfit gifted with the ability to chat with local cats. These two make their way across an apparently random landscape despite obstacles that constantly threaten their peace. Each has a lovely knack for befriending powerful,protective personalities. Though they never actually meet, their paths constantly intersect, impacting each other as
well as the broader world. And oddly, the coherence of the region in which
each moves seems to depend on the way one behaves in relation to the other.
As in dreams, their actions affect each other and their intimate surroundings. In the same way Nakata raises his umbrella just in time to protect himself from sardines raining from the sky, Kafka manages to help a tragic, unhappy woman find her way to the country of the dead, a mysterious place she's been seeking for 30 years of a long, obsessive life.
Murakami seamlessly stitches together bits & pieces of Japanese culture,
American pop, Asian and western philosophy, jazz, the spirit world, and much
more. In Kafka on the Shore. we meet an astonishing cast of characters,
including Colonel Sanders, a savvy and fast-talking pimp claiming he's
"neither god nor Buddha" but rather "a concept," and the deeply sinister
Johnnie Walker who stalks Tokyo's cats, collecting their souls for his own
dark purposes. If this novel sounds like a dizzying ride on a surrealist
rollercoaster, it's also an astonishingly enjoyable trip! Murakami is such
a master storyteller that, despite the book’s apparently scrambled,
haphazard details, the whole hangs together superbly.This is an unfailingly
readable though never overwhelming page- turner. ”
mamabrico wrote this review Saturday, September 8 2007.
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