Gritty Shaker

The Village Voice interview Haruki Murakami about his recently published short story collection After the Quake and his 10th novel, Kafka on the Shore:

“[The novel] has already sold 200,000 copies in Japan, he tells me, and he is responding directly to readers via a special Web site (www.kafkaontheshore.com). Told in the voice of a 15-year-old runaway in a chaotic world of falling fish and incipient terror, Kafka interweaves a boy’s life with that of a Japanese World War II veteran rendered illiterate by a coma, who upon partial recovery can communicate only with cats. The title is meant to represent the borderline between the conscious and the unconscious, land and sea, living and dead. ‘It’s my ‘road movie’ novel,’ Murakami says. ‘The characters are always moving, in Japan and in the nowhere-land, the underground. They live in a world of violence, and they know they have to fight it.‘”