Descriptive Review
The print that I have of this book is the standard one seen on the internet, 12.9*3*19.8 cm in dimensions in paper-back version. Cover design beautifully illustrated in minimalistic style by Noma Bar, featuring a cat and a face in a yin-yang fashion of black and red. The actual story is 416 pages divided into 49 chapters.
Spoiler Free Rest of the Review
On the actual nature of the content of the book, the review given by The Times is the most perfect -"Hypnotic, spellbinding". The story follows the lives of two people, Kafka and Nakata, the two central characters of the novel. If bluntly put, that's the whole story, you, the reader, follow the lives of these two characters and see how they affect each other without ever coming into contact. The story pans out like a well-organized mandala effect, where the actions of one, affect the other person even when he is miles away.
Kafka, a 15-year-old boy running away from his house to escape an 'imaginary' prophetic curse put by his father, and Nakata, an elderly person capable of talking to cats and is on a quest to close an unknown portal; that, on the face value, are the two storylines that hold this book together, at least on the surface. The two storylines go parallelly, we jump between one and the other main character's stories, see each's lives, interact with their respectively known side characters one at a time, but strangely, as already told, the stories never intersect but keep affecting each other, if not on the surface then at least in the grand order of the book.
The whole story is like a Greek play or a well-organized puzzle, with the plot interlocking itself in a strange snake-like structure. There is an element of unknown metaphysics in the story, but it is so fine-tuned that reading those sections feels less like an exposition of the worldbuilding and more like witnessing a fever dream. Yes, that's the best overall description of the book in my opinion is, a fever dream; and to compare it with any other known story to me, the best match I can find is the Bengali short story 'Ho Jo Bo Ro Lo' by Sukumar Ray (for interested people, the English translation of this book is also available as 'HJBRL - A Nonsense Story' translated by Jayinee Basu.) Reading this book overall feels like watching a watered-down Nolan movie, you always know or get the feeling that something is going on, and sometimes you even understand what is going on, but the magic comes from knowing something is going on but I just can't put my finger to it, but something definitely is going on. Kafka on the Shore has just the right amount of mixture of absurdity and mysticality that it keeps you turning the pages. It is less about the mystery that it is about the mysticality.
Starting to read the book I don't think will be, or was a problem for anyone, but the straining part comes around the middle of the book, where the characteristics Murakami like *strange* things start to happen, fishes fall off the sky, paintings on the wall start to get real, immortal soldiers from WW2 start appearing, cats and dogs start to talk, portals to other world opens, etc. If you are always tuned to hardcore non-fiction or realistic detective fiction, this book will be hard for you to get through; but if you want to experience a story that is more fluid, more about witnessing things than understanding them, then this book is for you.
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