Sometimes New is Strange

Interested in Japanese metaphysical fiction?  What about falling fish and talking cats?  Then this is the book for you!  YA approved!  But wait, there’s more!  We have seven copies for your bookclub enjoyment.  Hurry up and borrow today!

A teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom.  As their paths converge, the reasons for that convergence become clear, in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize. -Milan Kundera