
Kafka on the Shore
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Narrated by:
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Sean Barrett
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Oliver Le Sueur
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By:
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Haruki Murakami
About this listen
With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.
This magnificent novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle - yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.
Extravagant in its accomplishment, Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world's truly great storytellers at the height of his powers.
©2005 Haruki Murakami (P)2013 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life. Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves.
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outstanding, his best
- By Dakini on 11-26-24
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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Sputnik Sweetheart
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Adam Sims
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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K is madly in love with his best friend, Sumire, but her devotion to a writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments. At least, that is, until she meets an older woman to whom she finds herself irresistibly drawn. When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, K is solicited to join the search party—and finds himself drawn back into her world and beset by ominous visions. Subtle and haunting, Sputnik Sweetheart is a profound meditation on human longing.
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Satellites of Love
- By Darwin8u on 05-28-15
By: Haruki Murakami
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After Dark
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Janet Song
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Here is a short, sleek novel of encounters, set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami's masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. At its center are two sisters: Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny's toward people whose lives are radically different from her own.
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Six hour short story
- By Devo on 05-21-07
By: Haruki Murakami
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South of the Border, West of the Sun
- A Novel
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Eric Loren
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in 1951 in an affluent Tokyo suburb, Hajime - beginning in Japanese - has arrived at middle age wanting for almost nothing. The postwar years have brought him a fine marriage, two daughters, and an enviable career as the proprietor of two jazz clubs. Yet a nagging sense of inauthenticity about his success threatens Hajime's happiness. And a boyhood memory of a wise, lonely girl named Shimamoto clouds his heart.
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A River of Unmindfulness
- By Darwin8u on 10-12-13
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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After the Quake
- Stories
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Rupert Degas, Teresa Gallagher, Adam Sims
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The six stories in Haruki Murakami’s mesmerizing collection are set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. But the upheavals that afflict Murakami’s characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman.
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Reading is very annoying
- By Y.E. on 02-11-19
By: Haruki Murakami
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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor, Ellen Archer
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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The 24 stories that make up Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman generously express the incomparable Haruki Murakami’s mastery of the form. Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an ice man, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things for which we might wish. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit Murakami’s ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and entertaining.
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Fantastic, just like how all Murakami books are
- By MM on 05-05-15
By: Haruki Murakami
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Men Without Women
- Stories
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator, Ted Goossen - translator
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are lovesick doctors, students, ex-boyfriends, actors, bartenders, and even Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, brought together to tell stories that speak to us all. In Men Without Women, Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic, marked by the same wry humor and pathos that have defined his entire body of work.
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That's how we become Men Without Women
- By Darwin8u on 07-27-17
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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海辺のカフカ(上)
- By: 村上 春樹
- Narrated by: 木村 佳乃
- Length: 15 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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「君はこれから世界でいちばんタフな15歳の少年になる」――15歳の誕生日がやってきたとき、僕は家を出て遠くの知らない街に行き、小さな図書館の片隅で暮らすようになった。
By: 村上 春樹
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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage
- A novel
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Bruce Locke
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The new novel - a book that sold more than a million copies the first week it went on sale in Japan - from the internationally acclaimed author, his first since IQ84. Here he gives us the remarkable story of Tsukuru Tazaki, a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present. It is a story of love, friendship, and heartbreak for the ages.
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Great book ruined by the narration
- By David on 08-14-14
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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What I Talk about When I Talk about Running
- A Memoir
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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From the best-selling author of Kafka on the Shore comes this rich and revelatory memoir about writing and running and the integral impact both have made on his life. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers Murakami's four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon. Settings range from Tokyo, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston, among young women who outpace him.
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It is what it says it is
- By Rick on 03-10-09
By: Haruki Murakami
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First Person Singular
- Stories
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Kotaro Watanabe
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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From the internationally acclaimed Haruki Murakami comes a mind-bending new collection of short stories, all touching beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory...all with a signature Murakami twist. The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world.
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A Murakami novel ruined by the wrong narrator
- By Amazon Customer on 07-10-21
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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Underground
- The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin, Ian Anthony Dale, Janet Song
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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On a clear spring day in 1995, five members of a religious cult unleashed poison gas on the Tokyo subway system. In attempt to discover why, Haruki Murakmi talks to the people who lived through the catastrophe, and in so doing lays bare the Japanese psyche. As he discerns the fundamental issues that led to the attack, Murakami paints a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere.
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Just as you breathe, you dream your story
- By Darwin8u on 08-26-15
By: Haruki Murakami
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The Elephant Vanishes
- Stories
- By: Haruki Murakami, Alfred Birnbaum - translator, Jay Rubin - translator
- Narrated by: Teresa Gallagher, John Chancer, Walter Lewis, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.
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dull
- By Shelli Rodgers on 01-06-19
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
What listeners say about Kafka on the Shore
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-21-18
The narration by Oliver Le Sueur and Sean Barrett
The narration by Oliver Le Sueur and Sean Barrett is what makes this book amazing!
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- Eden
- 07-19-16
So much fun!!
Any additional comments?
Haruki Murakami weaves this bizarre world that you end up being sad to leave once the book is over. It's so much fun and the narration is perfect. I'm left with so many questions about the meaning of the stories and what the symbolism/metaphors really mean!! Loved the book - definitely worth a listen :)
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- Printing Cat
- 10-03-19
Great story but
Oliver Le Suer was no match for the characters brought to life by Sean Barrett, he was monotone and it was many times difficult to notice when Kafka or Oshima was talking since he didn’t even try to change the tone. But kudos to Mr. Barrett , what a pleasure to hear his interpretation of Nakata, Cl Sanders, Johny Walker... so bad that Oliver definitely was not match at all!
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- Brandon G Danowski
- 01-03-19
Engaging and Not Totally Fulfilling
I won’t say I didn’t enjoy this book. Loads of surreal stuff happens that keeps you guessing and seeking a connective tissue across the events. There’s fantastic happenings and settings that give you an appreciation for the authors creativity.
Unfortunately, I was just left with lots of questions at the end. Few things received solid answers or even the beginnings of explanations. This was a book where I went online and researched other people’s interpretation of the events, because I really didn’t know how I felt at the end. It was almost like I accidentally skipped an important chapter or something.
I think this is less a flaw of the story and more and misalignment with my personal taste. The story is, I think be design, not trying to answer questions about itself. It wants you to stew in the surreal and draw your own interpretations and connections between what’s going on and a broader meaning. This can be powerful for sure, and certain moment did resonate with me, but I felt wanting of that connective tissue in the end.
If you like the surreal, check this book out. If you need a story where things get explained and you’re left feeling like you know what the point of the story was and how it all connected, maybe pick something else.
P.S. The performances were fantastic!
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- Mubeen Ahmed
- 11-05-18
Existential dream
Loved every second of this book. The author conflates the dream with the reality to tell an amazing coming of age story of a 15 year old boy.
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- Christopher Allison
- 01-08-19
Well Performed
Murakami’s metaphysical magical realist bildungsroman riddle mystery is delightfully performed. Barrett and Le Sueur affectionately breathe life into every character. Each chapter alternates between two perspectives, and with it, the narrator. This makes for a clear, crisp transition between chapters. This, with many other touches, weaves into an overall poignant, joyful, and profound experience.
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- ecovibrance
- 01-05-18
great narration, great story
Great narration, I feel I learned something about Japanese culture and geography as well. The story had a magical realism feel too it.
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- Alex
- 08-31-20
Encore
Rich, dense...complex.
Different than other Murakami works.
I nod and shake my head (wink wink*) thinking I have to listen to it again to fully grasp its threads.
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- Johann Gudmundsson
- 08-04-20
Masterpiece
Journey into subconsciousness and dreams like no other book. Deep and provocative and hauntingly beautiful
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- Mark Galvin
- 10-11-16
How deep is too deep?
While I was listening to this audiobook, it felt very Lynchian. I started to search for the metaphors and meanings as the tale went farther down the rabbit hole. It was a bit too mysterious while some plot holes grew wide with more questions. I was intrigued enough to add a few other Murakami titles to my wishlist.
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