As usual, Murakami provides his delighted readers with a unique experience in Kafka on the Shore. It is sumptuous novel, layered with symbolism and literary references.  Murakami manages to masterfully preserve a strong sense of narrative and readability despite his experimental techniques and complex explorations of fundamental themes.  Kafka on the Shore interweaves the stories of “Kafka” Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway and Nakata, an older man with magical gifts bestowed upon him after a near-death experience dating from his youth.  The young “Kafka” searches for his mother who abandoned him, and Nakata seeks his destiny as a conduit between different states of reality.  Both characters are on Odyssean quests that are piloted by fate and haunted by echoes of the past. Combined, the two protagonists’ stories are like a bildungsroman in forward and reverse. To attempt to simplify Murakami’s work would be an impossible and unworthy task for any reviewer.  Kafka on the Shore is a book that needs to be digested slowly and lovingly. Any reader who soaks in its pages will be richly rewarded for doing so.

Good for fans of: philosophical stories incorporating magical realism; translated Japanese fiction; nuanced and contemplative literary fiction.

You may like this book if you liked: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles or other Murakami works; I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov; and Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges.

A dear friend of mine suggested this book , so i thought "why not?"

        summary :

   Kafka on the Shore is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, and the reasons for that convergence become clear, Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder. Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s great storytellers at the peak of his powers.

       review:

  I wasn't sure what to expect from this book , but as i started reading it , i found the characters relatable and likeable,  each one of them is fighting his own demons and trying to find his purpose or run away from his past. The story however was truly weird ,i felt like it was all over the place , from the young boy "kafka" looking for his mother and talking to an imaginary crow :

To the old man "Nakata " who talks to cats and makes the sky rain with fish:

The characters themselves were very nice , but their stories bothered me , i didn't enjoy them nor understand the point from them, And don't even get me started about the sexual content !, but i went through this story and read every page , because obviously all this weirdness left me with a lot of questions

But guess what??

I finished the book and still couldn't understand a thing! 

I would say the only good thing about this book is the character of "Oshima" , that character was the only thing that made sense in this book.

maybe it's just that this book isn't for me , but i wouldn't recommend it to anyone.   

Kafka on the shore is a labyrinth itself but in the end the crow gathers it all and leads the reader to the clue : " this world is a metaphor ". besides tens of symbols , this novel bears hundred of hidden and mystical messages and paradoxes .
recommended for expert readers .

I can't get enough of Mr. Murakami. This is more of a 4-star but his books are so far out there...I can't describe. Let me just say one character talks to cats. Nothing is what it seems in Murakami's world and I know I miss a lot (if not most) symbolism but his writing and characters are beautiful.