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Nguyen Huu Viet must have thought the worst was over when he buried his two-year-old son on Dec. 25. The boy had drowned two days before in a fishpond near their home in northern Vietnam's Thai Binh province, and Viet was undone by the death. At the funeral the family served raw duck blood and porridge?rural comfort food. Although they had heard that the avian influenza that swept Southeast Asia last year had returned, they thought the disease was confined to the south. The day after the funeral, Viet fell sick with flulike symptoms...
...story: boy meets girl, girl turns out to be his mother, boy kills father. Sophocles told it 2,400 years ago, as have many authors since. But few have tackled the Oedipal tale with as much wit, verve and retail success as Japan's Haruki Murakami has in Kafka on the Shore. The book sold 550,000 copies in its first month on his home soil in 2002, inspiring a sequel comprised of selections from the 8,870 e-mail critiques Murakami received and his 1,220 replies. Kafka has become a best seller in Germany, South Korea and China...
...novel, Murakami's 10th and his first big one since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in 1997, features a 15-year-old boy who runs away from his Tokyo home?shortly before his father's body is discovered in a pool of blood?and heads for distant Takamatsu. There he meets a mysterious librarian, who may or may not be his long-lost mother, and a sexy hairdresser, who may or may not be his vanished elder sister. Filling out the cast is an old man who lost his memory in an apparent UFO encounter but gained the power...
...ordinary 15-year-old. As well-read as a professor and alienated as Holden Caulfield (Murakami was translating J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye as he wrote the novel), the boy calls himself Kafka Tamura, though you never learn his real name. He left home because his sculptor father was a sadistic beast who drove wife and daughter to decamp years earlier and who cruelly tells the boy that he will someday kill Dad and have sex with Mom and Sis. Determined to be "the toughest 15-year-old in the world," Kafka flees the prophesy, only to collide...
...Japanese readers, most respondents said that if Kafka were dramatized, they would want to play Oshima, the librarian's impressively literate, transsexual assistant. Others preferred Hoshino, the earthy truck driver who helps the cat-talking old man in his quest to find a magic stone that can free the boy from his curse. Like any Murakami novel, Kafka defies both description and the urge to stop reading...