![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Only one of them, Satoru Nakata, emerged from the incident damaged-and it’s he who, decades later, becomes the story’s second protagonist: a childlike, scarcely articulate, mentally challenged sexagenarian who is supported by a possibly guilty government’s “sub city” and possesses the ability to hold conversations (charmingly funny ones) with cats. In 1944, a group of 16 schoolchildren inexplicably “lost consciousness” during an outing in a rural mountain area. ![]() Traveling to the small town of Takamatsu, he spends his days at a free library, reconnects with a resourceful older girl who becomes his de facto mentor, and begins to reenact the details of a mysterious “incident” from more than 60 years ago. In the first of two parallel narratives, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura drops out of school and leaves the Tokyo home he shares with his artist-sculptor father, to seek the mother and sister who left them when Kafka was four years old. Two mysterious quests form the core of Murakami’s absorbing seventh novel, whose encyclopedic breadth recalls his earlier successes, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997). ![]()
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