Book Review
by John Fox
Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
If you'd like to have a good hallucinogenic trip, you could fly to Amsterdam and buy some magic mushrooms – or read a book by Haruki Murakami. Given the rising of cost of transatlantics and the superb quality of Kafka on the Shore, Murakami's most recent addition to his fleet of fiction, I would suggest the latter. Plus, with the English translation running at 448 pages, the pleasure lasts quite a bit longer. Many reviewers have affixed characterizations to his work – casting a trance, throwing a spell, living a metaphor, reading a dream – but the short version is: the man succeeds in storytelling.
The structure of Kafka on the Shore, alternates between two storylines. In one, a fifteen-year-old boy afflicted with an Oedipal curse uttered by his own father runs away and makes a private library into a bivouac. In the other, an illiterate man gifted with a telepathic connection to cats is forced into a quest to open a portal. Eventually, the stories converge.
Murakami frequently begins his books this way, with a series of posts, each one a disparate element and character. He then progresses the narrative by slowly tying ropes between these posts, until a complex web is created. Not only do character arcs merge, mesh, and overlap, but themes align – if a spider, shadow, or piece of classical music is mentioned in one story, it inevitably shows up in the other story, as a bit of dialogue or perhaps a one-line observation. This interweaving does not stop within a single book. All of Murakami's fiction is interlinked, and Kafka on the Shore continues the reoccurring themes of his oeuvre:
A young boy with an Oedipal complex – reference the short story "All God's Children Can Dance" in After the Quake.
Parallel universes with halved or doubled characters – he hammered that refrain in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
For sexuality in situations when the two members share a significant age gap, check out Dance, Dance, Dance.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, his most epic and mature work previous to this latest publication, pre-echoes many of the leitmotifs of this novel – in-depth analysis of classical music, an obsession with cats, a fetishization of violence (skinning a man alive, methodical disemboweling of animals) and isolated locations for the hero to incubate before the climax of the narrative (bottom of a well, cabin out in the woods).
Murakami best departs from traditional fictional forms when insisting upon the realm of the metaphysical, which takes a postmodernist number of shapes – ghosts, alterative lands of existence, mirror lands and personas. He simply refuses to stick with physical "reality", and this attempt to emphasize the multiple layers of the unseen and unorthodox is commendable. (No idea is a more deplorable brainchild of the Enlightenment than the belief in a single-dimensional universe entirely testable by modern science.) Murakami views this departure – which some would label as stepping outside the boundaries of "realist" fiction – as an authentic representation of the real world. In a non-fiction article for Harper's Magazine called "Chance Traveler," the author tells a coincidental, fantastical real life story that rivals some of the fictional tales he's spun. His point: that his imaginary double-worlds, double-selves, and supernatural characters are not a metaphor for physical reality, coaching the reader by way of a heuristic fable, but rather they are reality as it exists. His fiction, therefore, paints the world exactly as he sees it.
In another departure from more standard fictional forms, Kafka on the Shore rapidly vacillates in its point of view and tense. While many mavericks have played with these techniques, what divides a winning attempt from a gimmick is whether it midwifes the delivery of significance and meaning. Murakami doesn't toy with gimmicks. His point-of-view shifts – between 1st, 2nd and 3rd person – are a technique that underscores the double-sided nature of each character and their flexible boundaries of self. His employment of past and present tenses highlights his characters' frequent remarks upon the flexibility of time. In both cases the unorthodox technique buttresses his points, though Murakami can hardly fit in with other novelists who are advancing ideologies with "points." He does make references – the doyens of classical music, Kafka, Platonic conceptions of self, Greek myth – which comes across as a suitably subtle approach.
Coincidence – which the characters in this novel do not believe in, characters in other novels are skeptical of, and, judging by the evidence, Murakami, himself, reserves a large hunk of cynicism for seems to afflict every character. (Two characters in different storylines bump into each other at an opportune moment. A boy falls into a trance at the exact moment his father perishes.) But, understood through the aegis of Murakami's vision, the mechanism propelling the storyline is not coincidence but fate. Fate directs and controls the characters lives. In this way, Murakami appeals not only to Greek narrative – with, of course, Oedipus, but also with a bird pecking a man blind – but buys into the overarching dynamic of Greek storytelling: that fate guides the unfolding of events. Because, as fate would have it, every Murakami story argues that our lives are linked by a complex web, and nothing we can do will sever those connections.
As far as judging the value of this novel, I have to concur with the Los Angeles Times assessment of the novels published in 2005: this novel topped the list. The breadth of imagination tapped in this story (the impact of imagination, by the way, also a topic discussed in the book) rivals his previous best work The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Both are epic pieces that display a storyteller operating in his imaginative prime. So when you compose your next do-to list for reading and want to experience a vivid dream, pass up your triangle-cornered copy of The Metamorphosis and read a new dream. Put Murakami's Kafka at the top of the queue.