海辺のカフカ - Murakami Haruki's Kafka on the shore

I read  "Umibe no Kahuka" in French ("Kafka sur le rivage"), and after that my heart can not choose between the two Murakami, between Ryuu's fascinating violence and Haruki's bewitching hypnose.
Be prepared, in Murakami's novels, you keep looking for, and you never find. The meaning of life, dreams, nightmares, fate are not revealed, never, even when the protagonists finally accept their destiny. It is a neverending quest of undetermined things. Sometimes you sink into nightmare scenes (following a mysterious cat murderer - after reading you will never look at a Johnny Walker's bottle in the same way), sometimes you just stay at the fringe of daily reality in subtile mono no aware ( the melancholy of things). Love is always the memory of love, the dream of a memory of love, the projection of a dream of a memory of love - and finally, love is always something lost or not happened yet, something you can't live for itself, right now.

The story itself is the one of a young man, Kafka Tamura , a new version of Œdipe who is convinced (thinks? knows? wants?) he is going to kill his father and sleep with his sister and mother. To escape to his destiny, he leaves home and goes across Japan, surviving. His trip is full of little considerations about how to find his way, how to save money, how to know who is really unknow in this world where strangers always seem to be the brother, the sister you should have had. At the same time, we follow another protagonist : lonely, old and handicaped Nakata, who has the unexpected power to talk to cats. A strange, dark and bloody event in his childhood left him outside the true world. Because Nakata has been cursed in the past, because Tamura is walking to meet his own curse, and because time has windows between past and future, we have the feeling that their lives are linked by a dark secret which absolutely has to be highlighted - but don't hope too much.
And you swim into this fantastic world, with ghosts, angels, Japanese and over-seas references ; and you don't mind if you don't understand, because it is so pure, so original, so close to your own dreams. Athmosphere is definitely the most striking component of this novel, in the way of Lynch's Mullohand Drive. Every single page, even in foreign version, is a piece of dream.

Interested in loosing your steps, have a walk with Kafka on the shore.

Murakami Haruki, Umibe no Kahuka