Life's a Beach
Coming from the same corner of leftfield as previous efforts by Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore features a motley crew of outsiders thrown together by fate. Murakami has created a strange world, marked by talking cats, fish that fall from the sky and (as you may have gathered) a constant use of symbolism. Here everything is a metaphor for everything else and everyday objects bear significance far beyond the obvious.
Kafka on the Shore focuses around two characters; a connection is implied between them but Murakami typically refuses to be explicit. The eponymous Kafka Tamura is a teenage runaway who has left his home in Tokyo and his cold, distant father in order to search for his long-absent mother and sister.
He takes a job at a library, where he encounters the unflappable and philosophicallyminded Oshima – who has a penchant for dropping quotes from Greek tragedy – and the enigmatic Miss Saeki, who may or may not be able to shed some light on the mysterious oracle that at once captivates and frightens Kafka. Despite the job, he continues to feel compelled to seek out his mother and sister, even as he fears the potentially oedipal consequences of finding them.
Meanwhile an old man named Nakata, with few remarkable characteristics except his ability to talk to cats, is involved in a quest to save the world – or maybe not. Murakami’s trademark obscurity actually begins to get quite infuriating at this point.
Initially, the object of Nakata’s journey is unclear even to the man himself, and the reader – like Nakata’s sidekick, an average-Joe truck driver named Hoshino – must climb aboard, suspend disbelief and draw his or her own conclusions about events. The major characters in this novel have one thing in common: they are looking for themselves, looking for the places in which they belong and the people with whom they belong.
This is a story about the quest for self-knowledge, wrapped in vividly bizarre trappings. Whilst the sharp peculiarity of this world is sometimes jarring, it works because the characters themselves are aware they are living in strange times, in strange places, and that they must deal with it the best way they can.
By the time fried-chicken icon Colonel Sanders approaches Hoshino in a dark alley, Kafka On The Shore has long since parted ways with reality or even plausibility, and yet the atmosphere of the novel is so cunningly designed that the reader is able to assimilate the information and move on.
Murakami’s prose, via Philip Gabriel’s excellent translation from the Japanese, is full of statements that could easily be abstracted as irritating pseudointellectual proverbs were they not earnestly borne out in the lives of his characters. These characters maintain a powerful realism even in the face of the insanity surrounding them: “When you walk out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who went in. That’s what this storm is all about."
The same could be said for the reader, who will probably never look at cats, umbrellas, or Kentucky Fried Chicken in quite the same way again. You may begin to think that life, the Universe and everything can be boiled down to a quote from Euripides (hey, it’s more useful than ‘42’), and that flutes hold the key to the composition of the Universe. You may even begin to believe that you are a metaphor.
After all, questioning reality and existence is what this strange, beautiful book is all about. Kafka on the Shore is unsettling and, at times, a very difficult read. Yet the rewards to be had from working through and with the text are worth these tribulations. It is not for the faint of literary heart, nor for those who like a comfortable cut-and-dry story. In the end it is a book that will repay multiple readings and active consideration.
Not for hardcore fans of Janet Evanovich or those with exams looming, but well worth considering for the long vacation. A superb, dark, mysterious and beautiful novel.
28th Apr 2005