Like driving through a tunnel of snowflakes in a raging blizzard, this novel simply sucks you into its own reality, leaving the rest of the world shut out as long as the book is still open. Kafka on the Shore manages to intertwine two stories stories together, stories which share points in common while avoiding all direct contact throughout the novel. One the one side there is Kafka Tamura, 15 years old and running from one past while searching for another. On the other side is Nakata, for whol only the present exists after losing himself in an unexplainable incident as a child. Murakami is sometimes compared to authors of the maginal realism movement, for example García Márquez. He certainly possseses the gift of telling stories, dancing seamlessly between the normal and the fantastic. All the while he maintains a tone and a presence very much his own, which is best experienced rather than described.