Kafka on the Shore

Two remarkable characters drive Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality: an aging simpleton named Nakata, who never fully recovered from a wartime affliction and is now drawn toward Kafka for reasons he cannot fathom, much like the most basic activities of daily life. Kafka Tamura is a teenage boy who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister. Their journey is enhanced by colorful companions and captivating happenings throughout, keeping it as mysterious to them as it is to us. People and cats converse, a ghostly pimp hires a prostitute who quotes Hegel, troops in a forest seem to have not aged since World War II, and fish (and worse) fall from the sky in rainstorms. There's a brutal murder, and both the victim and the killer are mysteriously identified; however, this, like everything else, has an eventual resolution, much as Kafka and Nakata's intertwined fates gradually come to light, with one escaping his fate completely and the other being given a chance to start over.