Kafka on the Shore. By : Haruki Murakami

The drowning girl’s finger
Search for the entrance stone, and more
Lifting the hem of her azure dress,
She gazes
At kafka on the shore

At beginning, reading this book just like we read two different and not connected stories. It’s about Kafka, a 15 years old boy who runs away from home either to escape from a gruesome oedipal prophecy and to search for his long missing mother and sister. And an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn towards something for reasons that, like the most basic activities of his daily life, he can’t fathom.

Try to escape from his former life, try to escape from his father curse. Kafka go to wherever as far as he could. Without any place to go, without any relatives he knew and without any plan what will he do next. After take some travel days, kafka comes to takamatsu city. and stay at a private library.

In the other part of this story, after a murderer of a cat stalker called Johny Walker, Nakata started his jouney towards something he can’t describe. With help from many people, nakata continue his journey until he meets Hoshino, a middle twenty years old truck driver who drove him until Tokyo and then accompany him to Takamatsu.

The two uncorrelated seem stories came to have connected step by step. As their paths converge and the reasons for that convergences become clear. What and whose Nakata search for and what the reasons for that. And what’s the correlation between Kafka and Nakata’s jouney.

Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats can talk, fish fall from the sky, and the spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or to commit murder. There’s just very thin border between reality and illusion or dream. This is unpredictable stories, just like Murakami’s. Some part of this story takes me to the other worlds, and I could imagine a place where no ages and no time.

At the end, it comes to the conclusion “In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”

“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there-to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there.”