Akutagawa Prize #130: Hebi ni piasu, by Kanehara Hitomi.Akutagawa Prize #129: Hariganemushi, by Yoshimura Man’ichi.Akutagawa Prize #128: Shoppai drive, by Daidō Tamaki.Akutagawa Prize #127: Park Life, by Yoshida Shūichi.Akutagawa Prize #126: Mō speed de haha wa, by Nagashima Yū.Akutagawa Prize #125: Chūin no hana, by Gen’yū Sōkyū.Akutagawa Prize #124: Seisui, by Seirai Yūichi.Akutagawa Prize #124: Kuma no shikiishi, by Horie Toshiyuki.Akutagawa Prize #123: Kiregire, by Machida Kō.Akutagawa Prize #123: Hana kutashi, by Matsuura Hisaki.Akutagawa Prize #122: Natsu no yakusoku, by Fujino Chiya.Akutagawa Prize #122: Kage no sumika, by Gengetsu.She also may or may not be the teenage runaway's mother and/or lover. Not by talking about the situation, but by talking about the details of the machine." Later on, we learn that the book's title is inspired by a 1970s song of the same name, written by a reclusive female character who serves as a kind of Japanese Kate Bush. The teenage narrator has taken Kafka as his new name because he loves the short story In the Penal Colony - he tells a sympathetic cross-dressing librarian that the execution machine in that particular story is "a device for explaining the kinds of lives we lead. Is this novel Kafkaesque? Although Murakami is as short on explanations as the Czech master, the allusions seem token at best, like the references to Nabokov or Camus thrown out by a pop song. Why does KFC's Colonel Sanders act as a pimp to a Hegel-quoting whore in a back street? How do you make a giant flute from cats' souls? What's with that abandoned sub-plot about alien possession during World War II? If you need answers, this book's not for you.Ī more pressing question hovers over the title. But the barrier between the banal and the inexplicable is increasingly porous in Murakami's work. Like every other Murakami novel, it involves portals into other dimensions, talking animals, jolie-laide women and an utterly ordinary suburban Japanese setting, full of truck stops and fast food joints and business hotels. The novel's structure is as rigorous as its imagination is freaky - a teenaged boy and an addled old man from the same Tokyo suburb run away, independently, to the island of Shikoku, fleeing involvement in a murder and drawn by strange forces.
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