The physical realities of Haruki Murakami's novels serve a purpose similar to a rising scrim on a theatrical stage:

	"KAFKA ON THE SHORE" By Haruki Murakami Knopf ($24.95)

He gives us just enough to hold onto initially, and then once we begin to understand his world and his characters, the scrim lifts, concrete certainties fade away, and his literary world expands into a dizzying universe of dreams, metaphysics and the bottomless pit of human emotion.

This is at once a coming-of-age novel reminiscent of J.D. Salinger, a metaphysical love story in the tradition of "Wuthering Heights" and a philosophical and psychological journey that should entice anyone from the layman to the most elite academic.

The novel follows 15-year-old runaway Kafka Tamura as he travels across Japan, as far from his detested father as possible. He finally takes refuge in the mysterious Komura Memorial Library, staffed only by the hermaphroditic Oshima and Miss Saeki, a beautiful but broken woman almost completely removed from the present, who Kafka comes to suspect may be his long-lost mother.

The other major character is Nakata, an elderly simpleton who was struck unconscious for two weeks in childhood during a class outing when all his classmates fell unconscious simultaneously.

Nakata was the only child who didn't recover completely. Since this incident, Nakata never regained the ability to read, write or think in abstract terms.

But he moves the story forward as the physical vessel through which Kafka and Miss Saeki act out their subconscious wills.

Shortly after Kafka leaves home, Nakata undergoes a gripping phantasm and murders Kafka's father. He then embarks on a mission that he does not understand, deciding his path step-by-step through dreams, random signs, conversations with a stone and other unusual means.

His path is inevitably linked with that of Kafka's, although the two characters and the roles they play in each other's lives remain largely unknown to each other throughout the book.

Like most of Murakami's work, this work revolves around themes of personal freedom and the pain of finding oneself.

All of the characters are in some way trapped by their physical realities, removed from what is dearest to them and yearning for their souls to break free.

While the end of the novel is by no means cathartic, the characters all achieve some kind of unity and understanding with each other, with themselves and with the muddled universe that has been tossing them all about like socks in a dryer.

This unity leaves the reader feeling as if, in one way or another, our characters' souls are free to go "home."

Throughout his career, Murakami has been at once lauded and condemned as one of the most bizarre novelists of our time.

The landscape of his literary world seems to know no bounds, racing through the past, present, and future; through the metaphysical and the mundane; through dream lives and waking lives; through the world of the living and world of the dead.

What sets Murakami apart from your average science fiction or ghost story writer, or from a storyteller who's read one too many philosophy texts, is that these vast leaps of his are so seamless as to be almost incidental. They are simply part of the larger truth.

Because his narrative employs such graceful economy and because he has a knack for presenting information and events exactly when it seems they need to be presented, readers enter the seemingly impossible realm of his novels with ease.

His characters are forever encountering the absurd, but with Murakami, the trick is not to suspend disbelief and actually accept these absurdities.

This narrative brings us to realize that the absurd, and all the contradictions and fantasies that come with it, are inside each of us.

The characters are lonely people. They are remote, isolated, cut off from anyone or anything where they might find a connection.

This changes little throughout the novel -- Miss Saeki doesn't get her lover back, Kafka doesn't get his mother back, and Nakata doesn't get his mind back.

But they and we the readers find not-so-cold comfort in the outwardly random connections they make.

At the end, the reader is left to ask if anything meaningful at all has happened in this story, or if the whole thing was simply a series of chance connections that the characters welded into meaningful links out of their own desperation.

We'll never know, and we are forced to wonder at the end of the book if it really matters: What is the difference between a relationship in "reality" and a relationship in one's mind, or in one's dreams, if the emotions are the same?

Murakami's prose style is addictive, and the depth and scope of his work is astounding. Not since Steinbeck has any writer managed to lift so much of the human psyche and deposit it in one novel.

Readers will come away from this book shattered, but reawakened to the limitless possibilities in themselves and in the cold world in which we live.

"KAFKA ON THE SHORE"

By Haruki Murakami

Knopf ($24.95)