This book features a runaway teenager, a mentally disabled man who can talk to cats, a murderous phantasm called Johnnie Walker, and some other being who looks exactly like KFC’s Colonel Sanders. There’s also extensive meditation on classical music, philosophy, and a fair amount of sex thrown in for good measure.

If I had to use one word to describe Kafka on the Shore, that word would be “dreamlike.” I’ve never read anything that more closely approximated the experience of being in a strange dream, where the real and the scary, the embarrassing and the impossible all blend into each other in a way that is somehow perfectly believable in the moment you experience it.

In my opinion it is this quality, more than anything else, that makes Kafka such an entrancing read. The story centers around a 15-year old boy, Kafka Tamura, who has run away from home. The reasons for his running away are never made completely clear, but he seems to be looking for his mother, who abandoned him as a child, and attempting to avoid a prophecy, made by his father, that he would kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister. Another central character is this guy named Nakata, who, as a child during WWII, fell victim to a mysterious ailment that left him mentally impaired but also apparently gave him the ability to talk to cats. These two characters are linked and most of the story follows their journey to the same town in Japan, where a woman who lost the man she loved in a seemingly meaningless act of violence tends a library, alone except for the assistance of a philosophically-minded youth named Oshima.

Everyone in this story has something they need to do. The obstacles they must overcome are primarily mental and emotional ones such as loss, insecurity, the feeling of abandonment, but in Murakami’s novel these mental and emotional problems have a way of being projected into the physical world in unexpected ways that are by turns magical, horrifying, or both.

There are mysteries in this novel that seem to beg for an answer but are left unsolved. Who is Johnnie Walker? Is he real? Is he Kafka’s father? What happens to Kafka’s father, anyway, and who is responsible for it? Is Mrs. Saeki Kafka’s mother? Somehow, though, just like in a dream, the fact that many of these questions are not explicitly answered doesn’t make the experience of having been in Kafka’s world any less satisfying.

Murakami has said of this novel that it “contains several riddles, but there aren’t any solutions provided. Instead, several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution.” Again, just like waking up from a dream, part of the enjoyment is derived from deciding on your own what everything meant.

There’s a lot more that I could say about this book but I find myself oddly worried about spoiling it, even though I’m not sure who I’d be spoiling this ten-year-old novel for, and as I’ve said the plot isn’t even really the point anyway. But I don’t feel like writing anymore so you’ll have to take my word for it that this is a good book.