Rated 5 out of 5. First posted on Goodreads. More on the reading page.

Dreamy, strange, wonderful. Murakami’s prose flows like a cold PB chocolate milkshake after a long run, decadent and velvety, leaving you happily content for the moment with the knowledge you’ll be pining for more.

Kafka on the Shore is magic realism at its finest. The magic is never garnish or kitsch, but instead, always delightful and prodding.

I instinctively compared it to Midnight’s Children and 100 years of solitude, being the only two other considerable works I’ve read in the genre. I adored the former (even writing my IB extended essay on it) and groaned through the latter. The verbosity in both books never grew on me and this is where Murakami truly shines. His prose, though not sparse in the Hemingway sense, is taut and supple and the richness of Kafka on the Shore’s characters meant that I was totally immersed in the book from the get-go.

I’ll be pondering over this one for a while.