Kafka on the Shore Paperback – January 3, 2006

Well, this was impressive.I have read one other Haruki Murakami novel some years ago, that being Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and while I really enjoyed that book, this one I loved. And besides, I can feel echoes of that one in this one, and those kind of connections bring me great joy, whether I am projecting them or not.What to even say about this book? What to say about Haruki Murakami? His works have the interestingly dichotomous ability to mix feelings of the small and the large, the personal and the sweeping, the banal and the mystical. Often while reading I'll find myself thinking... "What the f***?" And I can answer this only with the mantra: "No idea, it's Murakami." Some people maybe can't get behind that and still enjoy the novel, but I love it. The bizarre occurs without explanation, and the dreamlike is commonplace. He leads you from one question to the next so effectively that even when you don't circle back around for the answers, you're having too much fun to mind.And Murakami's sheer skill... His prose is excellent by default, and ranges into the beautiful. He paints a vivid picture without being overly descriptive, and he allows you to sink into a sort of flavor of a mood. There seems to be a very human understanding that bleeds through onto the page, and not just in his prose but in his character work. He taps into the heart of things, and reminds you why life's simple pleasures are pleasures in the first place. This is a man who seems to truly live, a man who knows how to take his loves and interests and inject them into a story that sticks with you.Kafka on the Shore is at its heart the inexorable, tidal pulling of two disparate storylines. That of Kafka Tamura, 15-year-old runaway haunted by a dark prophecy, and that of Satoru Nakata, an old man who suffered a childhood affliction that left him... different. How these two stories interact and interweave will leave you feeling like you're reading a riddle at times. Thematically he is playing with dreams, imagination, and responsibility. The darkness of the human subconscious. Ghosts. Memory. Time. Libraries.... Honestly, I find the book hard to capture in words, futile devices that they are. There were sections of it where I even doubted the reality of what I was reading. I mean, my favorite character in the book was probably Colonel Sanders. Do with that what you will.So much of this story takes place in that dark, ethereal labyrinth of your mind that it feels like you can only accurately explain half of it. And that second, unexplainable half is where the true magic lies. Which is, I believe, why I'm so drawn to his stories; they leave much to the imagination, and there is plenty leftover to ponder. Nothing is so tantalizing as the unknown, and Murakami understands that deeply. But as strange as the novel is at times, it really is beautiful. Emotionally effective, to say the least. I want to use the word gorgeous, even. The character work feels genuine, borderline romanticized. And the entire work is so intricately interwoven that it feels like the kind of thing you could jump right back into when you finish, which may have even been Murakami's intention.If you can't tell by the unfiltered praise, I loved this book. It belongs on my favorites shelf, I think. I don't think it's for everyone. It was overtly sexual in a way that caught me off guard, and in a way that I can imagine will make some readers uncomfortable. There are also scenes of overt, sometimes shocking, violence. But I don't fault Murakami for exploring the dark recesses of the human experience, or of stories in general. In fact, I think it would feel strange were those areas of darkness missing.Having just finished, I have that same sort of melancholic regret that I sometimes have when I finish a Ghibli movie; a long journey well-ended, characters coming full-circle with lessons learned, a strange new world that I want to stay in a little while longer. Needless to say, I'll be reading more of his work."Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there—to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there."

Murakami asked his writing class to submit plot twists and characters for a novel, daring them to be as outrageous as possible. The following list materialized:A retarded man who can interview catsA 15-year-old who has an affair with a 55-year-oldJohnnie Walker, as a murder victimColonel Sanders, as a pimpLeeches falling from the skyA child who kills his father and marries his motherA transvestite librarianA magical stoneA pop song named Kafka on the ShoreHe assured the class that he would incorporate them all into a seamless, compelling narrative. And he did.Of course that isn't how Kafka on the Shore was written. But it reads like it, just as The Wind-up Bird Chronicle--my other dip into Murakamania--reads like another continuous, illogical but convincingly vivid hallucination.This is Murakami's gift. He is a vivid realist, describing the sensory and psychological realities of everyday life. He writes without irony--at least any that can be discerned. Thus he can make the reader believe, stay attentive and tuned in. Comparable to Salvador Dali, whose command of 19th century realist devices enabled him to paint convincing melted watches, flaming giraffes and floating crucifixions, Murakami's realism can make the most unlikely events vivid and palpable. However, the multiple surreal and supernatural elements recall Stephen King--not a good association--in the way King could never seem to confine himself to one supernatural device when three or four could make the plot so much juicier. And Murikami's elements, like King's, are often unrelated, seemingly trotted in without rhyme or reason. There is no attempt to define a coherent world beyond the physical one, no supernatural cosmology; we are given only various hints that reality is porous, and that physical laws can be interrupted in various ways at various times, at the whim of the gods--or the author. These supernatural events don't build toward any one revelatory or climactic event, however, but are strung together like a necklace. This, I am inclined to argue, is Murakami's weakness. But then I had the same trouble with Halldor Laxness' Under the Glacier, which for me seemed eventually to disintegrate--melt?--into a dreamscape. Kafka, Beckett-even T.C. Boyle in Descent of Man--could build and sustain haunted quasisurreal worlds.But I am not sure of this criticism, that these comparisons are fair. I would suggest that everyone who is an audience for serious literature take a dip into Murakami. A singularity in the Modernist tradition, he represents the non plus ultra in a certain direction. As with Proust, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, etc. and more recently Handke and Sorrentino, reading him thus allows one to test one's assumptions about reality, literary limits, narrative expectations, emotional involvement, the human willingness to be enthralled by an obvious travesty. Wallace Stevens once made a statement:The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to bea fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is toknow that it is a fiction and that you believe it willingly.Murakami takes us to that level of self-conscious complicity. He succeeds in giving us the sensation that we are creating the story with him. By its very meandering, seemingly unfettered outlandishness, his story keeps us self-conscious about our suspension of disbelief, and thus of our active participation in the "fiction." In my experience no one has done that to this extent. So I can say to the worldly reader: read Murakami; you may discover something new about yourself, the mind, the imagination and maybe the possibilities of literature. And have an enjoyable ride, perhaps, in the process.Murakami knows well what he's about, and he shares it with us. He plants clues. The name "Kafka" is one. More to the point, early on the 15-year-old Kafka Tamura himself reads The Thousand and One Nights. Sheherazade's gift was to keep her auditor enthralled and expectant above all, and this is the author's forte. This book, like Chronicle, is outrageous, self-indulgent, whimsical, highly disciplined and tightly organized. It has the intense, insistent authority of optimal writing. Great literature or eccentric entertainment, I couldn't put it down.