I read Haruki Murakami’s book Kafka on the Shore after a number of friends had spoken positively of it and, well of all the other things to choose from in the library of the short term apartment I was staying in in Medellin it looked the best.
There were times in the book that I found myself struggling to care about the struggles of the characters, but Murakami’s prose is engaging in a way that makes the occasional breaks in engagement worth pulling through. This isn’t to say that it’s a difficult or unenjoyable read, just that it’s not that type of literature to which I’m normally drawn.
Japanese Magical Realism
Murakami’s novel fits within the stylistic tradition of magical realism first developed by Alejo Carpentier that is most often associated with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The main character’s are directed by hidden forces and assisted by supernatural powers and characters along a hero’s quest aligned with classical Greek mythology.
Set in modern Japan, with several flashbacks to the World War II era, Kafka On The Shore alternately follows a precious, solitary, and mentally and physically self-disciplined 15 year old Kafka Tamura that speaks to and is guided by an ideal projection of himself named Crow (hence the above image) and a mentally-handicapped man named Nakata from Tokyo prefect that can manifest small objects from the sky when upset, talk with cats and listen to stones – when they feel like speaking.
Kafka decides to leaves his emotionally absent father in order to hop a bus Takamatsu with the hopes of finding the mother that abandoned him and the sister that went with her. Throughout this trip he is constantly reminding himself, via Crow, that he has to be “the world’s toughest fifteen-year-old.”
After finds a secluded private library in which to spend his days–continuing his impressive self-education–and is befriended by a clerk and the mysteriously remote head librarian, Miss Saeki, whom he fantasizes may be his long-lost mother.
Nakata, cannot read, write, nor explain the forces drawing him toward Takamatsu to the other characters is nevertheless a highly compelling character. Despite the redundancies within his interactions with strangers, consisting largely of re-statements of his cluelessness and ignorance, I never felt that it took over the pace. There were other parts of the book were this happened, however when focused on the characters rather than the commentary on other worlds Murakami composes engaging prose.
Trauma, Oediupus and Personal Development
A main theme of the novel is the manner in which traumatic experiences come to shape the individual.
Both Nakata and Kafka’s stories are ones wherein early childhood experiences traumatizes them in such as way that the two are eventually drawn together – not face to face but in a way such that they confront those formative moments.
For both this means closing a door to their past left open, though while for Nakata this is literal for Kafka it is metaphorical.
Loss of family, alienation from society and the difficulty of finding one’s place in it structure the two main characters as well as the lesser characters like Hoshino the truck driver; Miss Saeki the Head Librarian; Oshima, a transgendered gay librarian and others.
Here’s a great website with illustrations of all the characters and more depth information on the novel worth exploring.
Fantasy, Sex, and Philosophy in Kafka on the Shore
While the age description here means that it’s not Salman Rushdie being spoken of, it’s a pretty recurrent trope that authors enjoy the company of young, attractive ladies. That Murakami put this in here, especially being so unattractive himself, i thought, was funny.
In close I wanted to highlight Murakami’s description of Hoshino’s tryst with an high-class, philosophy student escort while in Nakata’s service because it touches upon a number of themes that I develop in my own creative work and also as it seems to me to be a recurring trait amongst a large number of male artists – the dissolution of the self in the sex act into a metaphysical experience.
Post best-head-of-his-life orgasm, she starts quoting Henri Bergson’s ideas on elan vital and Hegel’s ideas on subject-object relations. I feel that this tryst highlights how writers often view such climactic relations with women in general. It’s never so simple as just a physical release of pent up liquids and energy, but such acts are part of deeper metaphysical dynamic which causes lasting sea changes in the view of the self.
Considering the incestual and Oedipal themes, as well as the many commentaries throughout the book on the duties of parents to children, I think that this could be an interesting avenue of exploration for other commentators to explore.