"Kafka on the Shore" - Haruki Murakami

This is the story of a teenage boy, who runs away from home in an attempt to escape his father's prophesies (curses). The boy also wonders about the fate of his mother and sister, who left when he was four never to be seen again. There is an interlocking story of an old man who has not been "quite right" since an incident when he was a boy during WW2, but gained the ability to talk to cats. A series of events interlock the stories of these two as they both travel from Tokyo to one of Japan's Western islands, introducing new characters along the way who help out the characters in their times of need.

There are interesting twists and contrasts - the simple, illiterate man blindly leading a truck driver who ends up being enlightened by his journey; the man who can only live in the present and the lady who can only live in her memories; Colonel Sanders and Johnny Walker appearing to the book's characters to ensure the carrying out of fated events; night time dreams that run into reenactments of events from many years before; and fish raining from the sky.

I enjoy Murakami books, and this is the third I have read. They all have some common elements - trips into the metaphysical, misfit characters of the Japanese kind, use of simile and metaphor, bold truisms buried in the text, references to whiskey drinking, eating and cooking, music, and graphic descriptions about the male sexual function (wanking, sex, nocternal emissions or fantasizing). [I could do with less on the latter, but then, he's a male author so I expect that he writes with some authority on the topic. It's written in a factual way, as a normal part of the life of the male characters, rather than being in anyway pornographic].

This novel has all the above elements. This had some lovely truisms in it... I marked the pages so I could quote them:

"Like someone excitedly relating a story only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."

" 'From my own experience, when someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them. I'm generalising, of course.' "

" 'Are the Japanese God and the foreign God relatives, or maybe enemies?'
'How should I know?'
'Listen - God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the devine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God any more. That's what Japanese gods are like - they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American chomping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o - God's no longer God. A very postmodern kind of thing. If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't. And if that's what God's like, I wouldn't worry about it.'
'OK...' "