Kafka on the Shore

Fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura runs away from his father's house in Tokyo, taking a bus west to Takamatsu, driven by a prophecy his father laid on him that echoes Oedipus and by a companion inside his head who calls himself the boy named Crow. He takes shelter in a small private library run by the elegant, distant Miss Saeki and her assistant Oshima. In a second strand, Nakata, an old man who lost his memory and his literacy in a strange wartime incident on a hillside where a class of schoolchildren fell unconscious, makes a modest living finding lost cats, because he can talk to them. Nakata's own journey west begins with a killing he does not intend and passes through a rain of fish, a truck driver named Hoshino, and a stone that must be opened. Murakami braids the two without ever quite joining them, and refuses to explain Johnnie Walker, Colonel Sanders, the soldiers in the forest or the entrance stone. It is a novel of dream logic held together by pop songs, Schubert and cooking, and it works on the reader the way dreams do, by adjacency rather than argument.