: A fifteen-year-old teenager leaves home, hoping to avoid his father's prophecy, but the intervention of mystical forces and the mistakes of others determine the path of the boy.

The novel is an alternation of two storylines in chapters: odd - the story of Kafka Tamura, told in the first person, even - the story of Satoru Nakata. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that both lines are interconnected. The first and forty-seventh chapters are preceded by the part “A guy nicknamed Raven”.

Raven guy

Kafka Tamura speaks with an imaginary friend, Crow, with his alter ego. When Tamura is 15 years old, he is going to leave home. He will be the coolest guy among the fifteen.

Chapters 1-20

Kafka (the boy chose his name for himself) took money from the house of his father, some things, a photo with his sister. The boy was 4 years old when his mother, taking the adopted daughter, left them with her father. On his birthday, he travels to Shikoku Island in the city of Takamatsu. On the way to Shikoku, Tamura meets the girl Sakura.

For the first week in Takamatsu, the boy visits the gym and the private Komura Memorial Library, where rare editions are collected. Here Kafka meets an employee of the institution, a handsome long-haired youth Oshima. Director of the Saeki-san library, a thin woman of 45 years old, slender, makes a strong impression on Tamura. “A thin, intelligent face. Beautiful eyes". “The woman just struck me - it was a kind of warmth from her. I wish I had such a mother! ”

On the eighth day, Tamura woke up in the dark in some thickets. The shirt has sticky blood. The boy does not remember anything. Fearing that he had committed a crime, Kafka decides not to return to the hotel. He calls Sakura, talks about the situation and remains to spend the night with her. Tamura thinks that the girl may be his sister.

In a conversation with Kafka, Oshima learns that the boy has nowhere to sleep. He offers to become a Kafka assistant in the library.

In the evening, the young man takes Tamura to Koti (prefecture on Shikoku Island), to a house that looks like a hut. They listen to Schubert's D major sonata, Oshima admires her imperfection. The young man says that he has hemophilia.

In the house in the thicket Kafka has a rest, reads books, walks into the forest.

Three days later, Oshima took Tamura back. On the way, he told the story of Saeki-san. In her youth, she was a good pianist, wrote the song "Kafka on the Beach", which in those days was a hit. She had a lover, the eldest son of Komura (a family containing a library), but at the age of 20 he died tragically. After that, Saeki-san quit music, isolated herself from the world, and then disappeared. After 25 years, she returned and became head of the library.

Tamura settled in a room in the library. An unusual picture hung there - a boy against the background of the sea.

Kafka accidentally learns that Oshima is a biologically female. But he feels like a wholly-owned man, especially since he does not have some features of the female body.

The first few chapters present a report by the US Army’s military intelligence service on the incident near Mount Rice Cup in 1944 in Yamanashi Prefecture: records of military conversations with eyewitnesses. The class teacher told how, during a mushroom trip, all the children of her class simultaneously fainted for two hours. Before this, a B-29 plane flew over them. A frightened teacher ran away to school for help.

The doctor tells about the results of the examination: all the children came to their senses, except for one boy - Satoru Nakata. In other children, all functions were normal, they did not remember fainting.

The professor of psychiatry, summoned to Yamanashi, put forward a hypnosis version: that is why the children lost consciousness. Two weeks after the incident, Nakata came to his senses. He was like a blank sheet of paper: he did not remember anything from what he knew up to this point.

In 1973, in a letter to the professor, the class teacher Nakata wrote that on the day of the incident the boy found her bloodied towel (she suddenly began menstruating) and brought the teacher, for which she was wildly angry, she was ashamed. She screamed at Sathora, whipping the boy on the cheeks. Then she hugged and apologized.

Nakata was evacuated from Tokyo. He was the cutest, smartest kid in the class. The woman repented.

The story of Satoru continues in the present tense. Old man Nakata searches for a cat Sesame and asks different cats about it (he understands the cat’s language). In these conversations, it turns out that Nakata is demented, cannot read and write, receives benefits, lives alone. Speaks wonderful, from a third party. One of the cats, Otsuka-san, notices that the old man’s shadow is pale. Otsuka-san once saw a man with the same shadow.

In search, the Siamese Mimi helps: Sesame was in the wasteland a couple of days ago. But there often appears a terrible type in a wonderful hat, catches cats and hides in a bag. He is very dangerous.

In the wasteland, a dog approaches Nakata and takes the old man to an unfamiliar house. There Nakata meets a man in a black top hat - Johnny Walker (as the man introduced himself).

Johnny Walker kidnaps cats and cuts off their heads. From the souls of cats, he makes unusual flutes. Walker made Nakata a condition: either the old man was killing him, or Johnny before his eyes dismembered his familiar cats. Unable to bear the bloody sight, Nakata kills the cat-dog. Mimi and Sesame he manages to save. After that, the old man lost consciousness.

Nakata woke up in the grass. To his surprise, not a single spot of blood remained on the clothes. He returned the Sesame seeds to the owners, received a reward. Nakata went to the police post and admitted to killing Johnny Walker. The policeman decided that the old man was crazy, and did not detain him. Before leaving, Nakata predicted that tomorrow it would rain from fish. And so it happened. In addition, a corpse of a man was discovered. But Nakata was no longer in the city.

Hitchhiker Nakata gets to Fujikawa (a village in Yamanashi Prefecture). There, the old man saw a guy beating a group of young men. Nakata opened an umbrella, and leeches began to fall from the sky. Hooligans left the victim alone.

The old man found a young chauffeur, Hoshino, who agreed to take him to Kobe.

Chapters 21-46

Kafka from the newspaper finds out about the murder of his father, Koichi Tamura, the famous sculptor. It was on that day that Kafka woke up in the thicket, stained with blood. The boy thinks of his father’s prophecy: “Someday you will kill your father with this very hand and live with your mother.” Oshima draws a parallel with the Oedipus of Sophocles, says that the whole world is a metaphor, but Kafka could not kill his father, being in another place. But Tamura is not so sure.

At night, the ghost of the fifteen-year-old girl Saeki-san appears in Kafka’s room. The guy falls in love with her. He tells Oshima about night vision. He advises reading the “Tales of Genji”: it describes a case where a living person becomes a ghost without suspecting it (the story is about a Lady from the Sixth Line who was jealous of Genji for his wife Aoi).

Tamura receives a 1969 Kafka on the Beach record from Oshima. The song took for the soul. Kafka finds symbolic meaning in verses that mention the stone from the entrance.

The police are looking for Tamur, because the boy is the only son of the dead sculptor.

One night, a real Saeki-san appeared in his room. She slept with open eyes and unconsciously seduced Tamura.

After the accident with Nakata, everyone seemed to cease to notice the once capable boy. Parents completely switched to the younger ones, Nakata was sent to Nagano with her grandparents in Nagano. There he learned to talk with cats. From the age of 15 he worked at a furniture factory - he had golden hands. After the owner’s death, the workshop closed. Earned money for his whole life was thrown downwind by his cousin Nakata. Then a brother arranged it in Tokyo for benefits.

Hoshino, who brought Nakata to Kobe, took time off from work and decided to go to Fr. Shikoku with the old man. Together they continue the journey and look, according to the old man, for a stone from the entrance. In between searches, Nakata falls asleep for a long time - more than a day.

Once, while the old man was sleeping, Hoshino was stopped on the street by a man who looked like Colonel Sanders from an advertisement for chickens, invited him to remove the girl and promised to tell him about the stone.

A prostitute serving Hoshino turned out to be a girl with a beautiful figure, moonlighting as a student of the Faculty of Philosophy. After their “date,” Sanders took the guy to the temple and gave him a stone. The colonel said that he was not a man, but an abstraction that took any form.

Tamura tells Saeki-san about her theory: the boy thinks she is his mother, and his father’s curse works: he loves and wants Saeki-san. In the evening, a woman comes to Tamura, and they go to a place on the seashore, where the artist painted a boy from a picture - "Kafka on the beach." From this night, a woman is already consciously entering into an intimate relationship with Tamura.

The guy is suspected of conspiring with his father’s killer and is actively sought. In addition, Oshima decided that Kafke is better off not seeing Saeki-san now: death is walking with her. He again takes him to Koti and warns that Kafka does not go deep into the forest. Before the war, during the exercises, two soldiers disappeared there, they were never found.

Nakata considers himself a dummy because of what happened in the war. Then he left and returned, so now he has to do his job

During a thunderstorm, they open the entrance: Hoshino with great difficulty turns over a heavy stone.

Once, while Nakata was sleeping, Hoshino went into a good coffee house, where he heard the Beethoven Archduke trio. The music made a strong impression on him, although before the guy was not interested in classics.

Hosino calls Colonel Sanders on a disconnected cell phone and says that they are looking for them with Nakata. While they can hide in the apartment rented by Sanders.

By rented car, Hoshino and Nakata traveled all over Takamatsu. The right place was the Komura library.

The next day they came to the library. Nakata was the very man Saeki-san was waiting for. In their conversation, it is revealed that a woman once also dealt with a stone from the entrance. Nakata's task is now to return everything to its place. He notices that Saeki-san also has half the shadow of him as he does.

After Nakata left, Oshima discovered the dead Saeki-san in his office.

At her request, Nakata burns all her notes about her life without reading. After that, Nakata fell into hibernation again. However, he no longer woke up: in a dream he died. Hoshino stayed with him: we need to finish the job.

Tamura dreams that he raped Sakura, while realizing in a dream that Sakura is his sister.

The boy walks the forest again, now with a spray of yellow paint, a knife, an hatchet and other things. Now he will not get lost. The guy felt like he was being watched. He regretted his act with Sakura, even if it was only in a dream. Suddenly Kafka felt like a "hollow man", threw a backpack, took only a knife and entered the thicket.

Making his way into the thicket, Tamura thinks of Saeki-san as a mother. Why did she leave him? Why didn’t she love him? But Raven convinces that the opposite is true: his mother loved him.

Kafka meets once young soldiers who disappeared in the forest. They deliberately remained in the forest, because they did not want to kill anyone in the war: this is cruel and pointless. Now they guard the entrance. Tamura decides to enter.

The sentries took Tamura to a hut similar to Oshima’s house. To him is the ghost of 15-year-old Saeki-san. She is cooking for Kafka.

Raven guy

A crow circled over the forest and saw a man in a top hat. He boasted of death of his own free will, calling himself a volatile spirit. Now he is in the border zone between life and death - limbo. The man stated that the Crow was not able to stop him. The crow tears the flesh of a man to shreds, but he only laughs. Laughter resembled the sound of a flute coming from another world.

Chapters 47-49

Hoshino learns from the talking cat what to do: at night he will appear, a bastard who cannot be allowed to enter, he must be killed. Then the Nakata case will be completed.

At night, a white long creature crawls out of the old man's mouth. Hoshino guessed that first you need to close the entrance - turn the stone over. After that, the guy chopped the slug into pieces. Hoshino burned the remains and left, deciding to call the police from the station and tell about the whereabouts of the corpse of Nakata.

An adult Saeki-san comes to Tamura and takes a promise from the boy to return while the entrance is open. She asks him to forgive the one who left him. “Mom,” you say, “I forgive you.”

The brother of Oshima Sad brings Tamura to Takamatsu. The boy decides to return to school and says goodbye to Oshima. Kafka thinks over Saeki-san’s words: “I want you to remember me ...” Crow says Kafka is the coolest guy in the real world. "I fell asleep. And woke up as a particle of the new world. "