Word: kafka
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...Kafka on the Shore, 2002 One of Murakami's most complex novels, Kafka blends Western myth, Japanese magic and religious concerns - rarely touched upon in earlier books...
...translated into about 40 languages. (In Japan, where Murakami is also regarded as an accomplished translator of American literature, the flow is neatly reversed: his recent rendering of The Great Gatsby sat atop the best-seller list for seven weeks.) Last October in Prague, he was awarded the prestigious Kafka Prize, dedicated to authors whose work "addresses the readers regardless of their origin, nationality and culture." It's difficult to imagine a better recipient than Murakami, who today splits his time between Tokyo and universities in the U.S. "The first [Murakami] story I translated for The New Yorker, they asked...
...precocious undergraduates from Sydney to San Francisco at his feet, the postmodernist master dismisses the foreign adulation with a tired hand, and finds himself returning to the world of his parents and his birth. Despite the title - and a cameo appearance by Colonel Sanders of KFC fame - 2002's Kafka on the Shore was Murakami's most overtly Japanese novel yet, delving into the florid mysteries of Shinto. He continues his homeward orientation in After Dark, a slip of a novella that explores a single night in and around Tokyo's sleepless Shinjuku district...
...literary model, Keret explains from his home in Tel Aviv, it is Franz Kafka. "Kafka tries to reach his moral goal by disorientating the reader," he says. "A short story in this style is like a slap in the face." If Kafka offers a slap, Keret's stories are more like a rifle-butt blow to the jaw. In one tale, the protagonist spots a woman walking down the street and sees, a second later, "the tip of a knife sticking out of the front of her neck...
...woman). Bayard argues that the real secret to knowledge, cultivation and passionate reading lies in avoiding the traditional, linear approach to books. "Books aren't so much made to be read, as they are to be lived with," he says. Hey, doesn't that remind you of something Franz Kafka once said...