This book is the most unusual coming-of-age and love story we have read so far from Japan's cult author: timeless and placeless, full of fairy tales and myths, straddling the line between dream and reality - and brimming with wisdom. "When my fifteenth birthday came, I left home to live in a distant, foreign city in a corner of a small library. If I tell everything in order, it will probably take me a week. If I instead just list the important points, it will take about the same amount of time. This may sound like the beginning of a fairy tale. But it is not a fairy tale. In no sense." The narrator of these lines is named Kafka Tamura, and his journey actually leads him out of the real world and into his own inner self, along the shores of consciousness. A fateful prophecy, the story of Oedipus.