Kafka Tamura runs away from his home in Tokyo, travelling almost randomly to a far-away city. There he spends most of his time in a special library, absorbed in his reading. After a little more than a week he wakes up in a park next to a shrine covered in blood that is not his own. Nakata is an old man who tracks down lost cats. His current job takes him to an abandoned building site where he sits and waits until a dog arrives and tells him to follow it. Such are the two disparate narratives in Kafka On The Shore, a strange, eerie, disturbing novel filled with the magical and the surreal, with diversions into the realms of art, music, and philosophy and an intricate, opaque metaphysical plot propelling the actions of the protagonists, while they try to makes some sense out of the odd, dangerous turns their lives have taken

It's certainly a superb novel. Murakami occupies a sort of calm, literary kingdom that starts at the point where Neil Gaiman, Flann O'Brien and Jonathan Carroll intersect. Very little of the underlying plot is explained, but, thematically, it all makes a dramaturgical logic, making sense as a narrative, with only sly hints at any underlying explanation. His characters, though, are alive, and richly developed and emotionally real, even in the most bizarre and shocking of circumstances. Mr Nakata, who can neither read nor write but can talk to cats, is a particularly engaging character in his simplicity and his innocence, both of which mask a tragedy of a lost life.

There's some very strange sex (the sex itself isn't strange, it's either who's having it or what's said during it), an aesthetic and spiritual awakening, a savage murder and weird things fall from the sky. And it all makes sense. It just doesn't get explained. How did he DO that?