Just finished this and my first comment would be that I’m surprised it didn’t take me long to read through 465 pages.
My second comment might be that my immediate response is a bit of a letdown. It seems that the weirdness continues, but in a way that reminds me more of horror stories or fantasy fiction rather than a more metaphorical discovery. This, despite the repeated statements by Oshima that "the world is a metaphor." Maybe I’ve just come to rely too much on Murakami to tell me what was going on, since it was pretty well hidden and he seemed to have all the answers ready to give.
And yet, I don’t feel the novel is complete. There’s a happy ending which frankly, I wouldn’t have expected and so maybe that’s where the twist comes in. The writing was good–obviously, if I read it so quickly–yet for the first 200 pages the story was rather normal, then it got me all excited when Murakami went weird on me, and then I just read along. seemingly watching for the telltale signs of clues as the two characters’ lives began to touch.
As far as the main characters, while I fell in love with the old man, Nakata, the boy Kafka was basically your rich kid who runs away to escape a dysfuntional family and perhaps seek his mother and sister. Unfortunately, I wasn’t impressed with the kid–oh, he’s very nice and all that–because everything just plopped right in his lap. I doubt that he had to touch the three grand he stole from his father to buy anything for himself. There was always somebody ready and willing to help him. These became the heroes for me.
I have to think some more on the whole labyrinth, netherworld idea, and the possibility that in dreams there is a way of having out of body experiences that Murakami seems to want us to consider as a possiblity. There’s just too much neatly tied up as the threads unravel, and yet no real answer that I felt appear as an impetus to delve deeper.
More later.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology