Original language:
Japanese Translated from: English
Authors: Murakami, Haruki
Translated by: Stasiūnaitė, Ieva
ISBN: 9789955232452
Published in: Vilnius
Published on: 2007
Publisher: Baltos Lankos
“Kafka on the Shore” – it’s one more long, but interesting Haruki Murakami novel, which let us enjoy writer’s unique style and mysterious reality world. This novel is full of detailed descriptions about characters, their actions, and sometimes it’s hard to understand what they mean in this whole story. Novel starts when fifteen years old boy Kafka Tamura runs away from home, and he starts to search for his sister, mother and himself, too. Because from four years old he lived with his father, and father predicted to Tamura, that he will kill his father and violate his sister and mother. This prediction in whole novel is chasing the character until it gets true.
But in this novel, there is one more story plot. Other story tells about old man Nakata, who can speak with cats, but he can’t write or read. He absolutely changes his life, when he kills an unknown person and by unknown reasons he goes to Takamatsu city, where he meets other character. At first, it looks like both stories are not relative, but at the end of this novel these stories become one. And it should become all clear, but for Murakami’s style it’s needed to keep mystery, so this novel ends by strange and not fully solved situation.
Haruki Murakami was born January 12, 1949 in Kyoto, but now he lives in Tokyo. Writer grew up exposed to Western culture, especially western music and literature, that‘s why his western attitude characterise him from other writers. There is no one word to describe his style of writing, because in his creation there is fantasy, erotica and reality. „Kafka on the Shore“ is the sixth book, which was translated into Lithuanian language. In 2006 this novel earned a Worl Fantasy Award and in the same year Murakami won Franz Kafka prize.
Haruki Murakami’s work is considered differently. Teenagers like this type of creation, but old people don’t like such openness and eccentric feeling. This type of novel we can compare to mythological stories, we can find some known music, and we can identify some writers and philosophers, which Murakami uses in his novels.