Kafka on the Shore,
by Haruki Murakami
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 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 the 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 hazard ness, 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.
D.C.
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