''Beyond the edge of the world there's a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And hovering about there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard."
That haunting passage comes close to the end of Haruki Murakami's ''Kafka on the Shore," but it might just as well have served as the preface, marking the entrance to the fabulous trail through identity, mythology, philosophy, and dreams that is this book.
Two main characters lead the journey, approaching from different directions and converging in a manner that is no less suspenseful for being inevitable. Kafka Tamura is a smart and solitary boy who has run away from home to avoid his father's prediction that, like Oedipus, he will one day kill his father and sleep with both the mother and stepsister who abandoned him when he was 4 years old. Nakata is the survivor of a mysterious event that occurs in an unnamed Japanese town in 1944, when a group of schoolchildren, out mushroom-picking with their teacher, suddenly crumple to the ground unconscious but with eyes wide open, raptly observing something not visible to the adults that tend to them. All but Nakata awake within hours, with no memory of what has occurred. But Nakata remains in this mysterious state for several weeks, and when he does return, he has forgotten everything he knows. Now, in his 70s, he is an apparent simpleton, unable to read or write but able to converse easily with cats and predict when mackerel and leeches will fall from the sky.
On his 15th birthday, Kafka takes all the money from his father's study and boards a train to Takamitsu, a seaside city far from his home in Tokyo. There he discovers and takes up residence in a small, private library where he is befriended by Oshima, a kind, erudite woman who lives life as a gay man and serves as Kafka's protector, confidante, and guide. However, Kafka is also mesmerized by the library's 50ish director, Miss Saeki, and the ghost of her as a girl of 15, both of whom engage him emotionally and sexually. Is Miss Saeki his mother? His sister? Or just an older woman trying to relive the great passion of her life, to negate the loss of the boy she loved at the age of 15 and lost at 20?