Kafka on the Shore

Apricots

Haruki Murakami

Title of the book: Kafka on the Shore

I have read most of his books and I am still a fan of his novels. I appreciate this one too although it is as lengthy as the Wind-up Bird Chronicle. It is a typical Haruki book, his imagination takes the reader immediately to another world of talking cats and absurd events as people who step in and out our daily world, he so easily tells about. It is a dream and not a dream. It is raining fish. The common and the absurd are brothers, the usual and exceptional are sisters, the story flies, jumps, crashes and effortless takes off again. The woods are silent, sometimes branches crack and leaves rustle. I have nothing else to do but read and swim. Memory and the Great Forgetting clash, turn around, crisscross and embrace.

They are front and back of time and space. Occasionally, I swim in the warm, blue sea. Life in the novel is fiction and fiction becomes life.

The young man run away from home boy, Kafka Tamura and the old Nakata, the hollow man, who lost his memory in the war apparently start as antipodes, but slowly approach the vanishing center point of the story, the presence without past or memory. The Greek tragedy of Oedipus pursues Kafka till it plunges in the presence, absorbing time and depriving it from its origin. Kafka becomes the main actor in the Greek myth. Without memory, life and death coincide and move around in the eternal circle of time. Personal responsibility is overhauled by Fate – everything happens as it happens. Music connects all happenings and emotions.

Music is the connection between reality and dream, the sound of a river on the background. The story follows its own track and leaves no traces. It occasionally crosses the borders of daily life and imagination leads Kafka and Nakata in adventures, which are as common as absurd, having no causes or consequences, but fill out time and space. Everything occurs as if it is already known and predicted, the basic stream of the sub consciousness. At he same time Kafka, Nakata and their friends do not know what will happen the next minute and in the long run they are not afraid or amazed of this. Will Kafka find the cat killer, Johnnie Walker, he doesn’t know? Will Nakata and his friend, the  truck driver, Hoshino find the entrance stone?  Why and what is the purpose of it? It is life as it enrolls itself satiated with its own  logic and hazardness, a blind  process of unknown meaning, which takes place without any obstruction or hampering the human effort. Fate takes over the personal choices of the characters, they are the actors who know their roles although sometimes they need time to find the right words or actions. The story touches the inexpressible, the subconscious layers of life. The characters wait and see and it occurs – no problem. They eat, sleep, make love and swim like I do and stay in the realm of the dreamy story.

This is where Zen comes in. Life  focuses on the moment and the sudden enlightment or the leap into thin air. It presents itself and vanishes in order to reappear. The way life and dream are interwoven, mixed and occasionally fused, it reminds me of  Zen-like tales. There is probably more Zen in the book than I can imagine. The jokes, the sudden turns in the story, the almost surreal or science

fictional happenings and experiences may also refer to Zen. The understanding of Nakata with the cats and of Kafka and Miss Saeki, the girl of sixteen, his mother and his lover, it all goes by itself.

The cleansing power of the ritual murdering of cats by Johnnie Walker and the murder of the boy’s father in his sleep are as natural as the bloodshed in the story of Oedipus. Blood is the substance we all swim in. It is the main stream of the story, that picks up its acceleration or slows down when needed. It is as inevitable and dangerous as the flux and reflux of the sea. In the end, Nakata is an even more intriguing and authentic person than Kafka, who finally survives his fate.

Why did Haruki chose Kafka as (the name for) his protagonist? Evidently, this Kafka tries to come to terms with life of the adults and his father as Kafka himself did. Remember his letter to his father. His world is as absurd, overwhelming and unmanageable as in Kafka’s novels The Trial and the Castle, where nobody is responsible or can alter the course of life and Fate reigns far into the tiniest corners of the mind. Fate or the Greek gods as Roberto Calasso suggests in his marvelous book K. And Fate

is blind as history is, when executed by people like Eichmann, whose biography Kafka Tamura reads when he lives some days outside the world, hiding in the woods for the police. All characters in the story carry out orders given to them, even when they do not know why. Society absorbs the individual. History takes over and turns into (mass) murder, Eichmann or Oedipus carrying out what they believe to be the purpose of life. Nakata, the hollow man, has murdered once to kill Evil, Johnnie Walker, the ritual murderer of cats. Nakata, the man who lost his memory, finally becomes the innocent savior. He is of no value anymore and dies in peace. As a reader, I want to stay with him, but he is suddenly gone. And also Miss Saeki dies.

The meandering of the story comes to an end. Slowly, the story dies out, the dream fades out.  Kafka returns to normal life, tragedy passes by, but doesn’t end as long as memory keeps itself alive. I go for a swim and return to the first page of Kafka on the Shore.