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For all the fantastic and farcical happenings in Haruki Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore" -- amnesia that renders the one who suffers it capable of talking with cats; an evil spirit building a flute of stolen souls, both human and animal; another spirit, this one a benevolent pimp, disguised as Colonel Sanders; a woman whose longing for the lost love of her youth gives rise to a ghost of her younger self; fish and leeches raining from the sky; two Japanese soldiers from World War II standing guard in a forest at the gates to the afterlife -- it's the most ordinary things that attain poetry and weight. I came fairly late to Murakami (and still haven't caught up) because I confess to being one of those readers who, hearing that a novel contains elements of fantasy and the surreal, imagine something that's impossibly arch while straining to inspire wonder. Even those of us who are turned off by the drabness of much contemporary realist fiction don't particularly want to read books about spouses that become pets, or goldfish who are really the Buddha, or gardens that contain entrances to subway stations.
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