With Kafka over the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a book every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and all over the world because of its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing recognition suggests that it’ll be read and admired for many years to come.

This magnificent new novel includes a similarly extraordinary scope as well as the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de push of metaphysical fact, it about Kafka within the Shore is normally powered by two exceptional people: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who operates away from home either to flee a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mom and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who by no means recovered from a wartime affliction and now is normally drawn toward Kafka for factors that, like the most basic actions of lifestyle, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is usually to us, can be enriched throughout by brilliant accomplices and mesmerizing occasions. Cats and folks carry on discussions, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors military apparently unaged since Globe Battle II, and rainstorms of seafood (and worse) fall from the sky. There’s a brutal murder, with the identification of both victim and perpetrator a riddle-yet this, along with the rest, is definitely eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually uncovered, with one escaping his destiny entirely as well as the other given a brand new start his own.

Extravagant in its fulfillment, Kafka on the Shore displays among the world’s truly great storytellers on the elevation of his powers.