An old man talks to cats and makes fish fall from the sky, Johnnie Walker kills cats and eats their hearts, Colonel Sanders is a back-alley pimp with a knack for the supernatural, and a 15-year-old runaway finds shelter from a cross-gender hemophiliac while fulfilling an Oedipus prophecy. No, this isn’t a bad joke, and you’re not having the weirdest trip ever. You’re reading the latest Haruki Murakami novel, Kafka on the Shore.
Murakami’s “insistently metaphysical mind-bender” (John Updike’s observation) follows two distantly interwoven plotlines. In the first, 15-year-old “Kafka” Tamura (he has taken this pseudonym to avoid detection by the police) flees his sinister sculptor father in Tokyo and travels by bus to the relatively provincial Takamatsu. He wanders to the Komura Memorial Library, where he meets Oshima, a hyper-educated woman who identifies as a homosexual man, and Miss Saeki, an enigmatic older woman who hasn’t truly lived since her lover died when she was twenty. This bizarre cast of characters gives Kafka room and board at the library, ostensibly for his help as an assistant but mostly because they are interested in his spiritual journey.
Meanwhile, Satoru Nakata, an old man whose childhood trauma deprived him of his memory and conventional intelligence but allows him to talk to cats, follows a trail of clues in a metaphysical scavenger’s hunt that leads him ever closer to Kafka, Oshima, and Miss Saeki. Along the way he picks up Hoshino, a truck driver and ex-soldier, who is sufficiently intrigued by Nakata that he ditches his job and his truck and becomes the old man’s disciple and sidekick (and a devotee of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio).
But for all Murakami’s postmodern surrealism, his narrative structure hearkens back to traditional themes. Besides the overt references to Greek drama (bits and pieces of an Oedipus retelling, and a near fatal backwards-glance into the spirit world), Murakami plays off the most fundamental aspect of Greek tragedy: fate. None of the characters in Kafka on the Shore is as powerful as the forces of fate that drive them, and none even try to resist. They accept the bizarre developments of their world with the resignation of a Greek chorus.
But unlike a Greek chorus, characters in Kafka react to the supernatural events that direct their lives with stoicism and some good humor. And that’s where Murakami’s wit really comes to light: by blending the inevitability of a Greek tragedy with a healthy dose of lighthearted surrealism, he balances the monotony of both genres. The fate that dogs his characters is neither moralistic nor predictable, yet its fantastic manifestations never fade into the languid dreaminess that plagues some surrealist literature. In short: fate provides the momentum and surrealism gives us something to look at along the way.
However, Murakami’s elaborate juxtaposition comes at a price. Like in Greek drama, none of the characters are quite flesh-and-blood—I wouldn’t fancy driving across the country with any of them (except maybe Hoshino the truck driver, who despite a supporting role enjoys the most compelling character development in the book). And the plot drags at times, taking us down false leads or going nowhere at all. Nakata and Hoshino spend the second half of the book trying to speak to a stone, while Kafka Tamura is falling in love with a painting. Something tells me Murakami won’t be getting many movie deals.
But that’s okay, because he probably didn’t want them anyway. He wanted to create a fairy tale steeped in our profoundest narrative and philosophical traditions, and in that he succeeded charmingly. The characters don’t trouble themselves with expectations or analysis, and neither should we. Just take it in and accept it for what it is—always weird and introspective, sometimes funny, and occasionally moving—and you may enjoy this metaphysical romp.
