His books became bestsellers were translated into many languages including English and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami''s unique and addictive fictional universe.Murakami writes with admirable discipline producing ten pages a day after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races) works on translations and then reads listens to records and cooks. More followed including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World but it was Norwegian Wood published in 1987 which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. That first novel Hear the Wind Sing won a new writers'' award and was published the following year. One April day the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. Although it may not live up to Murakami's masterful The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Nakata and Kafka's fates keep the reader enthralled to the final pages, and few will complain about the loose threads at the end.In 1978 Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo.

To say that the fantastic elements of Kafka On The Shore are complicated and never fully resolved is not to suggest that the novel fails. An unforgettable character, beautifully delineated by Murakami, Nakata can speak with cats but cannot read or write, nor explain the forces drawing him toward Takamatsu and the other characters. Meanwhile, in a second, wilder narrative spiral, an elderly Tokyo man named Nakata veers from his calm routine by murdering a stranger. Joining the rich literature of runaways, Kafka On The Shore follows the solitary, self-disciplined schoolboy Kafka Tamura as he hops a bus from Tokyo to the randomly chosen town of Takamatsu, reminding himself at each step that he has to be 'the world¹s toughest fifteen-year-old.' He finds a secluded private library in which to spend his days-continuing his impressive self-education-and is befriended by a clerk and the mysteriously remote head librarian, Miss Saeki, whom he fantasizes may be his long-lost mother.

But at some point between page three and fifteen-it's page thirteen in Kafka On The Shore-the deceptively placid narrative lifts off, and you find yourself breaking through clouds at a tilt, no longer certain where the plane is headed or if the laws of flight even apply.

The opening pages of a Haruki Murakami novel can be like the view out an airplane window onto tarmac.

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