Haruki Murakami : Norwegian Wood (book review)

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.