KAFKA ON THE SHORE

KAFKA ON THE SHORE
HARUKI MURAKAMI
GENRE: MAGICAL REALISM, FANTASY, NOVEL
FIRST PUBLISHED: 2002

"Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren't any solutions provided. Instead, several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It's hard to explain, but that's the kind of novel I set out to write" 

                                   - H. Murakami

It is easier to be bewitched by Haruki Murakami's fiction than to figure out how he accomplishes the bewitchment. His narrators tend to be a bit passive, and the stakes in many of his shaggy-dog plots remain obscure. Yet the undercurrent is nearly irresistible, and readers emerge several hundred pages later as if from a trance, more curious than ever and convinced that they've made contact with something significant, if not entirely sure what that something is.

Kafka on the shore is no exception, this time, Murakami's hero, a runaway boy calling himself Kafka Tamura, is only 15. Kafka is fleeing his father, a man whose shadowy malevolence takes the form of an Oedipal prophecy: Kafka, he insists, will kill his father and sleep with his mother and his older sister, both of whom vanished when the boy was 4. The story involves a number of eccentric characters- Nakata, a person with abilities to converse with cats and make leeches fall from the sky, a Johnny Walker, who eats cats'hearts to create a flute which can possibly make him eternal, a Colonel Sanders, who is nothing but an abstract concept, among others. The story, of course, is a very old tale in contemporary trappings. Can Kafka escape the legacy of violence he has inherited from his father, the DNA he equates with fate? 

"There’s a void inside me, a blank that is slowly expanding, devouring what’s left of who I am. I can hear it happening.”

 The mythic motifs in Kafka on the Shore, which are a characteristic feature of Murakami novels, remain frustratingly shady. Is Miss Saeki,the head librarian,with whom Kafka starts an affair, really Kafka's mother? Is Sakura, a fellow passenger Kafka meets early in the novel and "rapes" in a dream later on, really his sister? Did Kafka actually kill his own father in another dream using Nakata as an unconscious proxy? Is the Boy Named Crow, Kafka's occasional companion, Kafka's familiar, his superego, or his what? Is a giant evil slug crawling out of Nakata's throat an incarnation of Kafka's father trying to enter the netherworld? These loose ends, which remain far looser than in any Murakami novel to date, may invite different and interesting interpretation from the readers.

“It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.”

 Towards the end, deep in a forest, Kafka will encounter two imperial soldiers who stepped out of time during the war because they couldn't stomach the kill-or-be-killed nature of their lot. They haven't aged, but they also haven't lived. The soldiers aren't the only characters in "Kafka at the Shore" who have chosen suspended animation over suffering the depredations of time and loss. They take Kafka to a 'city' , where 'time is not a factor'; essentially a place guided by the 'entrance stone', where the dead and living people stay together. This is the peak of fantasy in the novel where the readers need to decide for their own interpretation of the flow of the story-line. Time and dreams play such a central role in this novel that its frightening.

“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep 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.”

One aspect which always strikes me is the author's style of writing and Murakami for sure bewitched me with his poet-like thoughts and the rich usage of metaphors and symbolism in this highly convoluted yet fantastical story-line. Kafka on the Shore is many things: the title of a song, for one, a painting for another.  

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine."

Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers. So great is the force of the author's imagination, and of his conviction in the power of the story he is telling, that all this quirkiness is made genuine. This dreamlike novel, is undoubtedly one of the most alluring, striving and inventive novels I've ever read, creating a thirst in the minds of the readers to know more and more. "The world is a metaphor, Kafka Tamura". No doubt: the kid is practically drowning in that metaphor -- but then aren't we all ?

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”