Kafka Tamura is a 15-year-old boy who runs away from home to escape an Oedipal curse: he will murder his father, a famed sculptor with whom he lives alone and sleep with both his sister and his mother, who abandoned him as a small boy. He runs off to a city where no one will know him and finds work and shelter in a library under the watchful tutelage of a hermaphroditic librarian, Oshima, and his mysterious and elegant employer, Miss Saeki, a middle-aged woman that may be Kafka’s mother, and who lives in mourning following the death of her lover years before.
No sooner does Kafka leave than his father is found murdered, and Kafka wakes up in a city miles away, covered in blood.
Meanwhile he meets a girl who may be his sister, and after a brief sexual interchange, rapes her in a dream. To complete the prediction, he embarks on an affair with Miss Saeki — first, with the ghost of her 15-year-old self, then with the middle-aged woman she is in the present day.
Poet and NEHU English Professor Esther Syiem, currently reading Kafka On The Shore, says, “I’m just halfway through, but it’s been holding my attention for it’s very thought provoking!”
“Meanings don’t come easily in the boy Kafka’s journey. Such incidents are common in Murakami’s novels. Kafka is just trying to live,” she adds.
In a second storyline that alternates chapter by chapter with Kafka’s adventures, an elderly man named Nakata flees to the same city after murdering a mysterious character who calls himself Johnny Walker (after the man on the whiskey bottle) and may in fact be Kafka’s father.
Nakata, who suffered an unexplained illness following a childhood UFO sighting, is now unable to read or write, but has the ability to talk to cats and to cause bizarre phenomena like fish and leeches to rain from the sky. He kills Johnny Walker to defend the neighbourhood cats Walker is murdering in order to build a flute that steals souls. Nakata befriends the trucker Hoshino, and together they carry out a mission Nakata is psychically compelled to complete — they must find the entrance stone that separates this world from the spirit world and thereby allow Kafka and Miss Saeki to find resolution.
Despite the Oedipal background, Kafka’s story is as much fairy tale as myth. Kafka is a teenager, a highly charged time of life, uniquely open to erotic and supernatural possibilities. He runs away to escape a wicked parent and finds himself in a place of mystery, comes under the protection of a wise guardian, and falls in love with a lonely and isolated beauty. Nakata’s story, by contrast, is much more spiritual — he is the holy fool, a simpleton who possesses otherworldly wisdom and a quiet, stoical dignity.
In John Updike’s essay on this book for The New Yorker magazine, he compares Murakami’s creation to the abundant and disordered spiritual world of Shinto, which stands in sharp contrast to the more mannered and highly structured monotheistic religions.
Murakami is presenting a very polytheistic worldview: not a single, ordered hierarchy of meanings, but a riotous, cross-pollinating sacred system. Yet his characters long for calm and emptiness. Nakata sits in a meditative trance while waiting for Johnny Walker and contemplates an interior world where everything is there, but there are no parts.
“This is my second Murakami novel. Thoroughly enjoyable, it is a mind-bending novel! I would like to recommend this to all,” says Syiem.
Reading suggestions for the week:
1. A Brief History of Seven Killings
by Marlon James
2. Collected Poems by Jeet Thayil