Kafka on the Shore

Well, this was impressive.

I have read one other Haruki Murakami novel some years ago, that being Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and while I really enjoyed that book, this one I loved. And besides, I can feel echoes of that one in this one, and those kind of connections bring me great joy, whether I am projecting them or not.

What to even say about this book? What to say about Haruki Murakami? His works have the interestingly dichotomous ability to mix feelings of the small and the large, the personal and the sweeping, the banal and the mystical. Often while reading I'll find myself thinking... "What the f***?" And I can answer this only with the mantra: "No idea, it's Murakami." Some people maybe can't get behind that and still enjoy the novel, but I love it. The bizarre occurs without explanation, and the dreamlike is commonplace. He leads you from one question to the next so effectively that even when you don't circle back around for the answers, you're having too much fun to mind.

And Murakami's sheer skill... His prose is excellent by default, and ranges into the beautiful. He paints a vivid picture without being overly descriptive, and he allows you to sink into a sort of flavor of a mood. There seems to be a very human understanding that bleeds through onto the page, and not just in his prose but in his character work. He taps into the heart of things, and reminds you why life's simple pleasures are pleasures in the first place. This is a man who seems to truly live, a man who knows how to take his loves and interests and inject them into a story that sticks with you.

Kafka on the Shore is at its heart the inexorable, tidal pulling of two disparate storylines. That of Kafka Tamura, 15-year-old runaway haunted by a dark prophecy, and that of Satoru Nakata, an old man who suffered a childhood affliction that left him... different. How these two stories interact and interweave will leave you feeling like you're reading a riddle at times. Thematically he is playing with dreams, imagination, and responsibility. The darkness of the human subconscious. Ghosts. Memory. Time. Libraries.... Honestly, I find the book hard to capture in words, futile devices that they are. There were sections of it where I even doubted the reality of what I was reading. I mean, my favorite character in the book was probably Colonel Sanders. Do with that what you will.

So much of this story takes place in that dark, ethereal labyrinth of your mind that it feels like you can only accurately explain half of it. And that second, unexplainable half is where the true magic lies. Which is, I believe, why I'm so drawn to his stories; they leave much to the imagination, and there is plenty leftover to ponder. Nothing is so tantalizing as the unknown, and Murakami understands that deeply. But as strange as the novel is at times, it really is beautiful. Emotionally effective, to say the least. I want to use the word gorgeous, even. The character work feels genuine, borderline romanticized. And the entire work is so intricately interwoven that it feels like the kind of thing you could jump right back into when you finish, which may have even been Murakami's intention.

If you can't tell by the unfiltered praise, I loved this book. It belongs on my favorites shelf, I think. I don't think it's for everyone. It was overtly sexual in a way that caught me off guard, and in a way that I can imagine will make some readers uncomfortable. There are also scenes of overt, sometimes shocking, violence. But I don't fault Murakami for exploring the dark recesses of the human experience, or of stories in general. In fact, I think it would feel strange were those areas of darkness missing.

Having just finished, I have that same sort of melancholic regret that I sometimes have when I finish a Ghibli movie; a long journey well-ended, characters coming full-circle with lessons learned, a strange new world that I want to stay in a little while longer. Needless to say, I'll be reading more of his work.

"Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there—to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there."

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

An intriguing and profound story of interlaced lives - Kafka Tamura (a highly perceptive 15 year old boy running away from home); Oshima (a superbly erudite and perfectly mannered librarian with a secret), Miss Saeki (the elegant middle-aged library owner whose shadow is only half a rich as it should be), and Nakata (an old man who cannot read but can talk to cats), as well as a rich cast of secondary characters.

It is a tale of love and love lost, an oedipal tragedy in new form, a story of honour and roles in society, and, as often with Murakami’s book, a quest to explore the hidden drivers of people and this world, and what is behind this world. As Haruki Murakami says, there is “a mechanism buried inside you” and it is this mechanism and the deep non-coincidental inter-connections between people that he loves to explore. This exploration is there also in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, A Wild Sheep Chase, 19Q4, and The Windup-Bird Chronical. We edge close to it, we feel it, we cannot fully grasp it and hence are left intrigued.

The language and deep reflections are also marvellous. Following are a few examples of what I liked:

“The more you think about illusions, the more they’ll swell up and take form. And no longer be an illusion.”

“Most great poetry is like that. If the words can’t create a prophetic tunnel connecting them to the reader, then the whole thing no longer functions as a poem.”

“Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loath.”

He has existential insights, deep views on literature (from Kafka himself to Japanese literature across the ages), and social-historical commentary (e.g. on the Japanese student uprising). Only two things bothered me – one is Kafka Tamura’s incredible sensitivity and insight and learning that seemed well beyond his 15 years; but then again one point of the book is that Kafka is not only the 15-year-old boy we see but is connected to other selves – there are more selves to this one self. Identity is a complex issue. The other is his use of sex scenes; these feel slightly as if they are tools to give the whole story a tension and energy, rather than a necessary and integral part of the story. But maybe I’m just being prudish and is probably a question of taste. Anyway, it works.

So, for writers looking for tools of the craft – look at the wonderfully unique voices of Nakata, Oshima and Miss Saeki; see the 3-dimensionality of these characters, and their evolution over the story (notably Nakata and Hoshino who helps him); understand how he creates intrigue and tension (e.g. Nakata’s meeting with the cold blooded cat-killer with other worldly motivation), and of course appreciate the many dozen jewels he leaves among the pages in terms of profound insights.

At its essence, Kafka on the Shore is a beautifully written story of an alienated fifteen-year-old boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home to escape a painful past and ends up on a journey to find a reason to live. But it’s told in an original and fascinating way that challenges the bounds of reality.

This is the second Murakami book I’ve read, after 1Q84. Perhaps two books are too few to establish a pattern, but I’ve noted the following: his main characters have an intense but understated internal life; and he likes to interweave a second story that parallels the ‘real world,’ but has little regard for reality. And this latter world is the more fascinating of the two.

In 1Q84, I became engrossed in the alternate reality, only to find he dropped some of the best characters about two thirds of the way through the book. I don’t expect every thread in magical realism to be tied up neatly with a bow, but it remained frustrating to invest in a character and have them merely vanish.

No such problem exists in Kafka on the Shore. Kafka’s series of encounters and adventures are for the most part real, and the people he meets are well drawn, each with their own issues. But Murakami alternates chapters with a second thread, the story of Nakata, an elderly man, who became a simpleton as a child during World War II, following an extraordinary occurrence that, in effect, erased his mind. Nakata follows a parallel journey that gradually converges with that of Kafka, but in a way far from what we’d think of as reality. Nakata talks to cats and makes fish rain from the sky, but can neither read nor write. Despite his simplicity, he is directed by some unknown force on a journey, where his fate is impacted by an odd array of characters—some real like the young truck driver, Hoshino—but most surreal, like Johnnie Walker, who murders cats to make a magic flute (yes, appearing like the man on the whiskey bottle label) and a pimp that looks like the fried chicken king, Colonel Sanders.

Anything can happen in this second thread. But as the book progresses, we find that Nakata’s story is a metaphor for Kafka’s journey, one that will eventually open the portal for Kafka to find his way from an empty life (the mind erased) to finding the will to live.

While not for those who prefer more straightforward fiction, Kafka on the Shore is an original and beautifully written novel, with a complex and intertwined story that could only be written by a master.

Murakami asked his writing class to submit plot twists and characters for a novel, daring them to be as outrageous as possible. The following list materialized:

A retarded man who can interview cats

A 15-year-old who has an affair with a 55-year-old

Johnnie Walker, as a murder victim

Colonel Sanders, as a pimp

Leeches falling from the sky

A child who kills his father and marries his mother

A transvestite librarian

A magical stone

A pop song named Kafka on the Shore

He assured the class that he would incorporate them all into a seamless, compelling narrative. And he did.

Of course that isn't how Kafka on the Shore was written. But it reads like it, just as The Wind-up Bird Chronicle--my other dip into Murakamania--reads like another continuous, illogical but convincingly vivid hallucination.

This is Murakami's gift. He is a vivid realist, describing the sensory and psychological realities of everyday life. He writes without irony--at least any that can be discerned. Thus he can make the reader believe, stay attentive and tuned in. Comparable to Salvador Dali, whose command of 19th century realist devices enabled him to paint convincing melted watches, flaming giraffes and floating crucifixions, Murakami's realism can make the most unlikely events vivid and palpable. However, the multiple surreal and supernatural elements recall Stephen King--not a good association--in the way King could never seem to confine himself to one supernatural device when three or four could make the plot so much juicier. And Murikami's elements, like King's, are often unrelated, seemingly trotted in without rhyme or reason. There is no attempt to define a coherent world beyond the physical one, no supernatural cosmology; we are given only various hints that reality is porous, and that physical laws can be interrupted in various ways at various times, at the whim of the gods--or the author. These supernatural events don't build toward any one revelatory or climactic event, however, but are strung together like a necklace. This, I am inclined to argue, is Murakami's weakness. But then I had the same trouble with Halldor Laxness' Under the Glacier, which for me seemed eventually to disintegrate--melt?--into a dreamscape. Kafka, Beckett-even T.C. Boyle in Descent of Man--could build and sustain haunted quasisurreal worlds.

But I am not sure of this criticism, that these comparisons are fair. I would suggest that everyone who is an audience for serious literature take a dip into Murakami. A singularity in the Modernist tradition, he represents the non plus ultra in a certain direction. As with Proust, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, etc. and more recently Handke and Sorrentino, reading him thus allows one to test one's assumptions about reality, literary limits, narrative expectations, emotional involvement, the human willingness to be enthralled by an obvious travesty. Wallace Stevens once made a statement:

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be

a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to

know that it is a fiction and that you believe it willingly.

Murakami takes us to that level of self-conscious complicity. He succeeds in giving us the sensation that we are creating the story with him. By its very meandering, seemingly unfettered outlandishness, his story keeps us self-conscious about our suspension of disbelief, and thus of our active participation in the "fiction." In my experience no one has done that to this extent. So I can say to the worldly reader: read Murakami; you may discover something new about yourself, the mind, the imagination and maybe the possibilities of literature. And have an enjoyable ride, perhaps, in the process.

Murakami knows well what he's about, and he shares it with us. He plants clues. The name "Kafka" is one. More to the point, early on the 15-year-old Kafka Tamura himself reads The Thousand and One Nights. Sheherazade's gift was to keep her auditor enthralled and expectant above all, and this is the author's forte. This book, like Chronicle, is outrageous, self-indulgent, whimsical, highly disciplined and tightly organized. It has the intense, insistent authority of optimal writing. Great literature or eccentric entertainment, I couldn't put it down.

A very good read with an immersive narrative. Murakami effectively transports you into a world that is painstakingly real in the literal sense but would resonate with even your most absurd imaginings, then validate them. My only concern is the amount of sexual content interlaced into this message. Might catch some off guard, but otherwise, Kafka on The Shore is worth the read.

One of the reasons many fans of science fiction favor Star Wars over Star Trek is the overt spirituality found in the story. There is the force, which holds a mysterious presence over all the jedi do, and manages to hold the audience in rapture as its sages explain its workings. Obi Wan teaches Luke how to use a light saber, and as an example of the force, tells him to lower the blast shield so he can't see his opponent and must feel his way in the fight.

Since humanity began telling stories, the world of fairies, genii, gods, and otherworldly heroes have walked with us to impress and leave in their wake mystery and awe over what they take for granted as everyday life. I've found that in South American and Asian literature the world of fairies and creatures we can only imagine what strange creatures the characters describes are, and amazingly show themselves in stories that would otherwise seem ordinary. Visions of the future in dreams, visits from dead relatives, crossing the boundary between the living and the dead, all are examples these authors seem comfortable telling. This is one of them.

Murakami tells the story of Kafka, the fifteen year old who never knew his sister or mother and despises his father, forcing him to leave home with a hefty bit of cash and go in search of something he couldn't identify at the time. He goes to an anonymous town, meets a girl a few years older than himself, has a sexual encounter with her, and leaves to find himself living at a library owned by an older mysterious woman he is later attracted to. The story is charged with human sexuality and in places becomes nearly gratuitous in the description of what happens. If it sounds a lot like the story of Oedipus, then you are right. It is the story of Oedipus told in modern day Japan with an overlay of Japanese culture and a fluid transition between what is real and unreal, life and death, and what is natural and supernatural. Like much of the animation coming from Japan, two worlds mix and the reader floats back and forth until each is indistinguishable. Anime seems obsessed with the relationship of the spiritual world to the digital one and how they two relate to each other in a way that can make sense with what came before.

What Murakami does well is his telling of the world of spirits where time stops and people are at the mercy of those who are familiar with the otherwise unfamiliar. He incorporates mystery into his story where it is obvious that a door to another world has been opened, and all the reader can do is stand and wonder along with the characters. The explanations of this other world are lacking, which works in the story to make it even more appealing and interesting. The story moves nicely, and each chapter ends with the reader wanting to know what happens next. Wonderful pairings occur. One is reminiscent of the pair in the movie "Rainman" where one is dependent on the other to survive in the world and seems to belong to another place, yet has so much to teach the person who seems wise to all around. Characters are strong and vivid in the story, and when they meet it is a task to imagine what the two would say to one another.

The story, however, lacks in contrast to what happens with Kafka and conclusions the story comes to in the end. The dialogue in the more dramatic parts is overly sentimental and predictable, which doesn't fit well with the wonderfully vivid and interesting descriptions of what happens to its characters.

Overall, it is a compelling read with interesting characters that are easily known. Certain conversations serve as an entrance to the mysterious world created, while others seem to serve as filler where characters can't seem to transcend the ordinariness of everyday interaction. He does well with showing the extraordinary in the extraordinary, but the extraordinary in the ordinary is still a mystery.

I found this book to be good enough to finish. Just good enough to finish. Some reviewers have fancied Kafka On The Shore a metaphor, claiming that metaphysics excuses Murakami from following any rules of logical sense. This is hogwash, of course. I do not dismiss nonsense by saying that it can mean whatever the reader wants it to mean. I have read and thoroughly enjoyed Franz Kafka, and I am disappointed to report that Kafka On The Shore sullies his name.

Murakami creates interesting plot threads, for example a strange occurrence having a possible connection to some kind of UFO, only to abandon them later. He brings in a rather forced Oedipal plot thread, seemingly for the purpose of informing the reader of how well-read he is. Throughout the book, Murakami pathetically brags about his vast awareness of classical literature and music. Murakami also finds it apparently edifying to include a number of sexual descriptions, both graphic and gratuitous. I’m reminded of a certain kind of Japanese pervert that specializes in molesting young school girls by rubbing against them on crowded trains. Murakami’s writing makes me feel like one of those girls.

In addition to the ideas being scatter-brained and incoherent, Kafka On The Shore also suffers from the really bad prose of what I (charitably to Murakami) attribute to a really bad English translation. The version I read was tediously rife with cliches. I understand that Murakami has a few successful books out, so he can presumably afford a translator that can write better than a junior college student. In fact, I would recommend that Murakami and his translator both enroll in a creative writing course at the junior college level or above.

There are also strengths in Kafka On The Shore. Murakami do not abandon or defile every one of his intriguing ideas. The book was, after all, good enough to finish. I’m just left wishing that it had been a good book.