Amber Reviews Murakami

 

I get so bored sometimes. They’re letting me out of the house now and again, but it’s still not really warm and no good for sunbathing. I’ve divided to write some book reviews to pass the time. I mean, like I’ve been reading this whole long, Swedish winter and came across a few good ones. One of the most interesting was “Kafka On The Shore” by Haruki Murakami.

 

Haruki’s kind of an acquired taste I guess, but a lot of readers have made that acquisition, which is weird, because he’s so off the wall. I mean really. His books are so different from anything else I’ve read. The protagonist is a fifteen year old boy with no mother on his birth certificate. He runs away from home and meets these weird people. Almost everyone in this book is weird, but they are believably weird which is refreshing. Nothing blows up, and nobody gets shot. I mean, it’s not a murder mystery. One human gets stabbed to death, but he made this old man stab him, and he had it coming if you ask me. He was killing cats, of all things. I guess that’s what I liked best in this book, not that someone was killing cats, but the old man who stabs him talks to cats, which is so cool. And there’s like, time travel, only not like science fiction, but time just sort of shifts around, starting from 1944 in Japan when a bunch of school kids are looking for mushrooms and they, like, trip out or something. One of them has a sort of Oedipus complex.

There are some interesting bits about Beethoven and Hayden. I guess Haruki’s kind of a music freak as he also manages to talk about the Beatles, Eric Clapton, Stan Getz, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding, Prince, Puccini and Coltrane, all in one book. It’s a long book, but really… There’s also a lot of philosophical stuff if you’re into that sort of thing.

I guess I really haven’t told you all that much, but if you’re looking for something to take to the beach this summer you could do worse.