Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

just think about now. About books waiting to be read in the library, machines in the gym I haven't worked out on. Thinking about anything else isn't going to get me anywhere.
    "That's the ticket," Crow tells me. "Remember, you're supposed to be the toughest fifteen-year-old on the planet."
    Like the day before, I buy a box lunch at the station and take the train, arriving at the Komura Library at eleven-thirty. And sure enough, Oshima's there at the counter.
    Today he's wearing a blue rayon shirt buttoned to the neck, white jeans, and white tennis shoes. He's sitting at his desk, absorbed in some massive book, with the same yellow pencil, I guess, lying beside him. His bangs are all over his face. When I come in he looks up, smiles, and takes my backpack from me.
    "Still not going back to school, I see."
    "I'm never going back," I confess.

    "A library's a pretty good alternative, then," he says. He turns around to check the time on the clock behind him, then goes back to his reading.
    I head off to the reading room and back to Arabian Nights. Like always, once I settle down and start flipping pages, I can't stop. The Burton edition has all the stories I remember reading as a child, but they're longer, with more episodes and plot twists, and so much more absorbing that it's hard to believe they're the same. They're full of obscene, violent, sexual, basically outrageous scenes. Like the genie in the bottle they have this sort of vital, living sense of play, of freedom, that common sense can't keep bottled up. I love it and can't let go. Compared to those faceless hordes of people rushing through the train station, these crazy, preposterous stories of a thousand years ago are, at least to me, much more real. How that's possible, I don't know. It's pretty weird.
    At one o'clock I go out to the garden again, sit on the porch, and eat my lunch. I'm about halfway done when Oshima comes over and says I have a phone call.
    "A phone call?" I say, at a loss for words. "For me?"
    "As long as your name's Kafka Tamura."
    I blush, get to my feet, and take the cordless phone from him.
    It's the girl at the front desk at the hotel, most likely checking to see if I'm really doing research at the library. She sounds relieved to find out I hadn't lied to her. "I talked with the manager," she says, "and he said they've never done this before, but seeing as how you're young and there are special circumstances, he'll make an exception and let you stay at the rate the YMCA arranged for you. We're not so busy right now, he said, so we can bend the rules a bit. He also said that library's supposed to be really nice, so he hopes you'll be able to take your time and do as much research as you need to."
    I breathe a sigh of relief and thank her. I feel a little bad about lying, but there's not much I can do about it. I've got to bend some rules myself if I want to survive. I hang up and hand the phone back to Oshima.
    "You're the only high school student who comes here, so I figured it must be for you," he says. "I told her you're here from morning till night, your nose stuck in a book. Which is true."
    "Thanks," I tell him.
    "Kafka Tamura?"
    "That's my name."
    "Kind of strange."
    "Well, that's my name," I insist.
    "I assume you've read some of Kafka's stories?"
    I nod. "The Castle, and The Trial, 'The Metamorphosis,' plus that weird story about an execution device."
    "'In the Penal Colony,'" Oshima says. "I love that story. Only Kafka could have written that."
    "That's my favorite of his short stories."
    "No kidding?"

    I nod.
    "Why's that?"
    It takes me a while to gather my thoughts. "I think what Kafka does is give a purely mechanical explanation of that complex machine in the story, as sort of a substitute for explaining the situation we're in. What I mean is..." I have to give it some more thought. "What I mean is, that's his own device for explaining the kind of lives we lead. Not by talking about our situation, but by talking about the details of