The mythic motifs also remain frustratingly shady. The wartime X-File is revisited only once, the UFO is never explained, and the spectral village between the worlds serves little discernible function, beyond being a place for Kafka to escape to and then a place to escape from. Unless I am being particularly dim-witted, loose ends remain far looser than in any Murakami novel to date. Reviewers cultivate the habit of leaving the last couple of chapters under a polite shroud, but giving away the ending of Kafka on the Beach would be a tall order because not even the author does that. Here the novel's two strands braid themselves together. Meanwhile Nakata, whose attempt to turn himself in for murder is dismissed as simple dementia, follows a psychic urge westwards in the company of a drop-out truck driver, Hoshino, all the way to Takamatsu, Shikoku. In the depths of the surrounding forests he finds the entrance to a semi-real hinterworld. To evade the investigation into his father's death, Kafka goes to earth in Oshima's mountain hut.

Back in strand one, Kafka falls in love with the 15-year-old ghost of Mrs Saeki and begins an affair with his employer Mrs Saeki, in reality old enough to be his mother, whom she may well be. All subsequently recovered, except for one boy, Nakata, who remained in a coma for some weeks before waking up, as he says, 'not very bright', but with the power to talk to cats.įive decades later, in the course of his job as a finder of strayed household felines, Nakata is coerced by Kafka's father (posing as 'Jack Daniels') into stabbing him to death in a 'kill me or the cats get it' scene. The second strand begins as an X-File recorded by American Occupation forces, and narrates how a group of wartime evacuees foraging for food in the Shikoku mountains glimpsed a possible UFO before losing consciousness for several hours. Here the cross-gender librarian of a private library, Oshima, and its enigmatic owner, Mrs Saeki, provide the mature-beyond-his-years runaway with employment and a roof. Kafka winds up in the provincial city of Takamatsu on the smallest of Japan's main islands, Shikoku.

In the first strand, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura (we never learn his real name) runs away from Tokyo and his sculptor-father who kills cats to make flutes from their souls. The plot is a slow-ravelling two-strander.

Murakami kafka