Kafka on the Shore

by Haruki Murakami

Hardcover, 448 pages

English language

Published Jan. 18, 2005 by Knopf.

ISBN:: 978-1-4000-4366-8
OCLC Number:: 56095515

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(54 reviews)

21 editions

willowmillway reviewed Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Kafka on the Shore

4 stars

I couldn't help but feel that this story was "Lynchian". The premise is mundane, Kafka Tamura is just another kid running away from his family. The deepening of the story involves chance encounters which later become inseparable from a dramatic notion of fate. Tamura is drawn into a vortex, his fate at odds with the rational, modern, mundane sense of reality brings out the surreal. This is something that the story stylistically clarifies: that surrealism is about subverting what we expect from reality. Dreams are based on our experiences but they are uncanny because they do not follow the rules of the waking world. on the Shore also interestingly seems to suggest kinship between surrealism and myth, Murakami places in our mind the idea that myth is dream and dream is myth. Oedipus and Orpheus live in the unconscious, ruling our fates whether or not we realize it. And this …

Jenny Fern reviewed Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Review of 'Kafka on the Shore' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I don't think Murakami is for me.
Enjoyed Nakata's story.
The reading experience was enjoyable, and I was hooked in by the beginning, but in the end I left feeling no real impression and like I "didn't get it."

das reviewed Kafka on the shore by Haruki Murakami

Review of 'Kafka on the shore' on 'Storygraph'

1 star

A quite interesting mystery full of self-discovery at its core, with quite an unusual narrative that tells this story from multiple angles at once, this book seemed quite promising from the start. However, the overly casual dialogues that oscillate between intentionally inarticulate and pseudo-intellectual quickly got on my nerves, and the subsequent attempts to make light of pedophilia as well as incest were only the last straw. I'm fairly confident that this is the worst book that I've read in the past decade or so.

snaiden reviewed Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Review of 'Kafka on the Shore' on 'Storygraph'

3 stars

Extremely profound in a way I don't really understand yet. Like, really do not understand. lol

pophyn reviewed Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Review of 'Kafka on the Shore' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I really don't know what I think of this book. From a bit I read, that might be fine with the author, so maybe I'll leave it at that :-)

Molly Foust reviewed Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Review of 'Kafka on the Shore' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This book had passages with stunning insight. I liked the talking cats, the hermaphrodite, the library as a magical place. I found it masterfully well written, unique and thought provoking. But the last 150 pages of this book dragged on and on and for an eternity, and I found myself getting terrible ADD and finishing two other books in the interim. It gets a 5 for being well written, and a 2 for being entertaining, something like My Name is Red, which lingers still on my list, half read and most likely abandoned now for good. Kafka on the Shore is like a piece of inventive experimental modern music from the 30's, that is fun to think about intellectually, interesting to dissect and inventive in form and content, but not something you want to listen to over and over again.