So I lied. I was totally intending to read Never Let Me Go first, but I won't have a chance to get to my local library for a week or two so I just decided to re-tackle some of the books I already owned. And I'm so happy I did. I had the perfect day yesterday sitting on the new couch in my apartment, reading and drinking some tea and watching it snow out the window and reading this utterly insane book.
Kafka On the Shore is a story about a 15 year old boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home and goes to live in a library. There he falls in love with the head librarian, a private women with a mysterious past, and begins to grapple with demons of his own history. Along the way leeches fall from the sky, there are regular conversations with stray cats, Johnnie Walker makes a flute, we find out a lot about Beethoven, the past bleeds into the present and a lot of sex is had is had by all.
Let me begin by saying that I think Haruki Murakami is a genius and he's always been one of my favorite authors. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, which is also on this list, is my favorite book of all time. After reading that book, I tackled some of his other works, including Kafka on the Shore. I remembered the basic plot and that I had enjoyed it the first time, but it was well worth the second rereading. When people find out that my favorite book is the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, they usually say they've never heard of it and ask what it's about, and my response is usually, "I haven't really got the foggiest idea." The same is true for Kafka On the Shore- I loved it and couldn't stop reading it, but if you asked me to sum up all the metaphors and symbolism and literary throwbacks and strange, strange connections, I wouldn't have a clue where to begin. And that what I find so refreshing about all of Murakami's works- you can't just put everything in a neat little box and call it a day. His writing doesn't have to make sense, because sometime life is just like that - utterly random with no deeper meaning, at least not one we can see right away.
I was curious to see if anyone else could find some overarching themes in the book, so I did a little research and found out that on his Japanese site, Murakami allowed fans to ask questions about the book. He received over 8000 questions and personally answered about 1200 of them, but that didn't really seem to clear anything up. He said about it,
"...the secret to understanding the novel lies in reading it multiple times: "Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren't any solutions provided. Instead, several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It's hard to explain, but that's the kind of novel I set out to write".
This is reminding me of my Zen Buddhism class. Oh, Murakami, you clever bastard. Let me talk about how much I love you some more.
First off, I cannot get over how refreshing his characters are. Murakami writes people not as they are, but as they should be- all the trivial small-talk boring details stripped away and just these characters that cut to the very marrow of what human beings should be. His characters are all very strange and direct and he is completely unapologetic about it. For instance, in this book Oshima starts out as just receptionist at the library who takes Kafka’s backpack every day, but Murakami has no trouble transforming him into this mysterious-transsexual-green sports car driving-hemophiliac-mountain dweller, all in the space of a few pages, and it still doesn’t feel over the top. It makes you think that the people you know might be like this, boring and presentable on the top, but each with these wild secrets hidden inside them, just out of reach.
And his dialogue, oh, it’s so crisp and beautiful. In true Japanese form there is never a word out of place, and every passing comment hints at some hidden meaning. It makes me think of those times when, very rarely, you can have a perfect conversation with someone else, maybe a close friend or maybe a stranger. It feels like you are no longer talking around each other but are talking with them, working together somehow to arrive at some deeper conclusion that you couldn’t have reached alone. You'll be trucking along, reading up a storm, and then they'll just be a turn of phrase that stops you in your tracks. For instance,
“That’s why I like to listen to Schebert while I’m driving. Like I said, it’s because of all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection that stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I’m driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of—that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging. Do you know what I’m getting at?”
Ah, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing.
In conclusion: Haruki Murkami is an evil genius, I hardly understand anything that's going on, but I think it is beautiful and strange and haunting and well, well worth the journey.
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