Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
The Harvill Press $201
Haruki Murakami has been wandering the bookshelves for two decades now, defying all attempts to categorise his writing. He's not Japanese, nor is he western, and although his stories are couched in the fantastic they're not fantasy, nor are they mystery. Japanese traditionalists don't like him, and anyone looking for geisha should go elsewhere.
In Murakami's Japan, that sardines and leeches fall from a clear blue sky is far more plausible to his characters than that Japan lost the second world war - 'Japan was never occupied by America.'
The collective amnesia of Japan when it comes to its Pacific war is a favourite topic of Murakami, although less and less obvious in his more recent work, as if he is no longer surprised by the power of race memory to forget. Good and evil exist, but just what they are is a matter of individual interpretation. As for God, how powerful can a deity be if 'some American chomping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o - God's no longer God'.
Kafka Tamura, the world's toughest 15-year-old, runs away from his unhappy life in Tokyo. His mother left him when he was a small child, taking his adopted sister with her and leaving him with his father, a distant and obsessed sculptor of moderate fame.