The Sunday Haul: Finding 'Kafka On The Shore'

Temptation comes in many forms. To me it comes in the form of books. Even when the wallet is near empty I cannot resist picking up a good title whenever I come across one. And when it happens to be a book by a writer like Haruki Murakami then all resistance crumbles, instantly. That’s what happened to me on Sunday when I found ‘Kafka On The Shore’ at Abids.

I had thought that with festivals drawing closer the shoppers would be crowding the regular shops in Abids, there wouldn’t be many second hand booksellers. I would just make the rounds just to satisfy myself, I thought as I set out for Abids. But I was wrong. Some of the booksellers found places where they could arrange a few books for display. It was with one such bookseller that I found my third Haruki Murakami.

A friend was recommending ‘Kafka On The Shore’ very highly so I did not want to let go of it when I saw it. I have almost finished ‘Blind Willow Sleeping Woman’, my first Murakami book I found at Abids about a year ago. Sometime back I had found ‘Hardboiled Wonderland End of the World’ at a second hand bookstore. I found my third Haruki Murakami even before I could finish reading the other two. But I picked it up anyway even though I had to shell out a hundred rupees for it, which for a book of 600 plus pages is quite reasonable.

That was the only book in this Sunday’s haul and it turned out to be quite a haul.