Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

Kafka on the Shore is what would happen if Franz Kafka and Chuck Palahniuk got together and had a baby.
I decided to read it upon reading the review written by This Person, which is very unusual considering that usually I read books without an inkling as to what the story is about. But this novel is about Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway, and the elderly Nakata, who never recovered from a mysterious coma when he was a child. It is hard to become taken immediately with Kafka (if at all) whom has no recollection of his mother or sister (but definitely has some sort of oedipal complex), however it is easy to fall instantly in love with Nakata. I rarely become involved with characters, I am merely an observer, but when confronted with the brilliant portrayal of Nakata I couldn't help but feel for him.
We are presented with both their stories on their journey to one another, or to themselves as the case may be. Kafka is nothing more than a boy who has suffered through the abandonment of his mother, he mental abuse from his father and his terrifying prophecy. He runs away from home and finds drawn to a private library and things begin to fall into place.
Nakata on the other hand is an illiterate elderly man living on a sub city, earning some extra money finding cats (because he can talk to them) and finding himself on a journey that he doesn't understand. Fish and leeches fall from the sky, Colonel Sanders is embodied and books are read.
The characters all seem a little too erudite, talking like they have all the knowledge in the world and as though the only way that Murakami could get his point across was having someone explain it directly. But that doesn't make it any easier to understand, the book is rife with existentialisms (a subject I will admit to not caring for), hidden meanings and some pretty strange themes that I wasn't all that comfortable with. At times it became a little convoluted.
The books starts off magnificently but starts to slide off into a tangent that is little more than predictable, trying to make sense of everything and tying it into a little bundle but in the end leaves many things inadequately explained. The novel has so much potential such as brilliantly written characters and an interesting scenario, but falters towards the end. This is my introduction to Murakami and certainly will not be the last.