Source of book: I own this
It has been a while since I posted. One reason is that my book reading ended up with me in the middle of several books all at once but not finishing one. The other was a certain amount of malaise (ongoing) around the state of our country. It’s too overwhelming to blog about right now, although I recommend following Heather Cox Richardson and Rebecca Solnit (on your preferred social media) if you want good analysis of Il Toupee’s latest unconstitutional actions.
This book was this month’s selection for The Literary Lush Book Club, our monthly gathering of friends to discuss books. I believe this is the first time the club has read Murakami’s fiction - we read Underground, his non-fiction account of the subway terrorism a couple years ago. Two of us are definitely fans, so we were excited to get to discuss this one with the others. I will list the links to my other Murakami reviews at the bottom of this post.
Having read Kafka on the Shore, I think this will be the book I will recommend for first-time Murakami readers. While his most accessible is still definitely Norwegian Wood, that book is also somewhat uncharacteristic - it lacks the magical realism and the interconnected symbolism of his other books. Kafka contains all of the elements, but is of more moderate length than many of his books, and is tightly plotted, with fewer digressions and disconnected subplots.
(That said, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a definite masterpiece.)
Keep this handy when you read any Murakami novel...
Before getting too far into this post, I do want to mention a few things that might make this book problematic for some readers.
First, Murakami is a Boomer male, which means he shares many of the faults of his generation of male writers throughout the world. Like Dickens, he struggles to write female characters well, and often treats them as “types” that exist mostly for the role they will play in the life of the male protagonist. (Ahem, David Copperfield…)
Oddly, Kafka is better about this in some ways, and worse in others. On the plus side, he has multiple female characters that actually have a backstory and an inner life. That’s good!
On the other hand, my GOD does he objectify breasts in this book. Seriously, dude, you come off as a horny old man writing about your fantasies of being a 15 year old boy again. So, read this book with your eyes open. Or not as you prefer.
Second, and this is a serious trigger warning, Murakami’s books usually have one incredibly intense and disturbing scene in there. And they often come out of nowhere, getting really dark and horrible really fast.
(As explanation: Murakami credits Stephen King as one of his major influences - and it shows at times. Most of this and his other books are not horror at all, but there are those scenes…)
In this case, if cruelty to animals, including cat heads in the freezer, is too much for you, be warned. If you want to read the rest, skip chapter 16 and find a summary instead.
Our club was torn on whether this scene was needlessly gratuitous or not. I tend to lean toward “not,” but your mileage may definitely vary.
I also do want to mention one unexpectedly progressive element in this book, particularly considering it was originally published in 2002 (translation published in 2005.) There is a transgender character, who is mostly handled well. This character is given a history and an inner life, his trans-ness is not particularly important to his purpose in the book, and he has no unpleasant ending. He’s just an important and interesting transgender character who happens to be in this book.
Kafka on the Shore contains many of the usual elements of a Murakami book: questions of identity, memory, history, free will, human nature, and the process of maturity. And the symbols: dry wells, cats, missing things, forests, libraries.
Front and center in this one is one of Murakami’s favorite points: evil is often a lack of imagination. If we cannot imagine, we cannot understand morality let alone act morally. This is, more than anything, what separates us from other living things.
The book contains two parallel narratives, which do not intersect in the real world (whatever that exactly means in this book.) They do, however, intersect in the dream world, the magical world, or whatever you want to call it. The characters are connected as well - a figure in the magical world will represent one in the real world, and a character in each thread can be a stand-in of sorts for one in the other.
The first thread, which gets the odd-numbered chapters, has a rough plot as follows: A 15 year old boy, who has given himself the name of “Kafka,” runs away from home to escape the curse his father has put on him. This curse will seem familiar to any student of literature, because it is the Oedipus Curse: he will kill his father and have sex with his mother. And, in this particular twist, he will sleep with his long-lost sister as well.
As we discover, Kafka’s mother disappeared when he was a small child, taking his older sister with her. No one knows where they went or what happened to them.
Kafka steals enough money to last for a while, and heads south. He eventually discovers a private library open for tours (which reminds me of a smaller version of a favorite place of my own experience, the Huntington Library.) There, he meets the middle-aged and mysterious Miss Saeki, in charge of the library, who he finds out has a tragic past. (Her boyfriend - from the family whose estate houses the library - is senselessly murdered in college, and she has never gotten over him.)
He also is taken in by Oshima, a young transgender man who works as an assistant to Miss Saeki, who introduces him to classical music and literature. Oshima’s brother has a cabin in the forest on the coast, where Kafka stays on two occasions.
Meanwhile, Nakata’s story fills the second narrative. We flash back to his childhood, during World War Two, when he is sent away from the city for safety, but then becomes part of a mysterious event where a group of school children all lose consciousness. Nakata is the only one who doesn’t regain consciousness within a few hours, and when he finally does, he has lost his memory and ability to read. But he does discover he can talk to and understand cats.
Fast forward to the present, and Nakata is retired and on a pension (a Sub City as he calls it), and supplements his income by finding people’s lost cats.
A particular case leads him to the harrowing scene I mentioned above, and he is practically forced to kill the cat-abuser, who calls himself “Johnnie Walker.”
Later, we find out that this is the first intersection of the plots, and of the worlds. “Johnnie Walker” is killed, but in real life that turns out to be Kafka’s father. Nakata comes to after the murder, and finds there is no blood, no evidence it ever happened. Instead, it is Kafka, who, having lost consciousness, wakes up covered in blood.
There are some definite Oedipus parallels in this entire narrative - the book is full of Easter Eggs like all Murakami novels.
Shaken by this, and impelled on a quest that he cannot articulate beyond “must find the entrance stone,” Nakata hitchhikes his way south. Taking pity on him, and wanting a little vacation, is Hoshino, probably the best character in the book. Hoshino got in a little hometown jam, so they put a rifle in his hand - so to speak. His mild criminal history followed by a military stint, eventually led him to his present occupation as a commercial truck driver.
The strange friendship between Nakata and Hoshino is what makes this narrative thread so delightful - and I think it is the best part of the book.
I’ll leave the plot description there, in part because trying to explain it is difficult, and misses much of the magic of the writing.
As is often the case, the ending is difficult to entirely decipher. What exactly happened? And, perhaps more to the point, what did all that mean?
Murakami wasn’t much help in this regard. He recommended that the book be read several times. The reader would then begin to see all of the interconnected riddles, and, perhaps figure out a solution. That said, Murakami also indicated that there was no one correct solution, and readers could discover or synthesize many.
He also explained that he came up with the title of the book first, then the character of Kafka, then the other characters, and then he followed them to find out what would happen. How true this is can perhaps be debated given the tight plotting of the book. However it started, Murakami clearly went back through it and made sure everything connected and corresponded, because few if any threads are loose in this book.
I ended up writing down lot of lines this time. There are so many good ones in this book, particularly of the philosophical variety. There are undoubtedly spoilers in here, so if you want to read the book first, then come back to this post, this is a good place to do that.
Kafka has a kind of alter-ego he calls “The Boy Named Crow.” This is another literary in-joke. “Kafka” means “Crow” in Czech, something the OG, Franz Kafka, consciously used in his own writing. Crow is kind of a Tyler Durden sort (h/t to another book club member for that insight) - he both gives Kafka the courage to run away and take other actions but also isn’t exactly a great influence. Here is a particularly Durdenesque bit early in the book:
Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you.
The flashback to the weird incident of the children is told through official reports. Which, as you might imagine, pose multiple levels of narrative unreliability. And they are often surreal, with the teacher (who is hiding some things) seemingly overly poetic in her descriptions.
It was a very strange sight. The children had collapsed in an odd, flat, open space in the woods where it looked like all the trees had been neatly removed, with autumn sunlight shining down brightly. And here you had, in this spot or at the edges of it, sixteen elementary school kids scattered about prostrate on the ground, some of them starting to move, some of them completely still. The whole thing reminded me of some weird avant-garde play.
I mean, WUT?? And there is the parallel of this spot - in its own way like the bottom of a dry well - with one later in the book where Kafka has some crossover with the dream world, along with some leftover soldiers from the war. (That scene expressly describes the clearing as being like the bottom of a well.)
Murakami loves libraries - and I agree with him. Kafka goes looking for a library for reasons that have drawn others since they were created.
I decided to kill time till evening at a library. Ever since I was little I’ve loved to spend time in the reading rooms of libraries, so I’ve come to Takamatsu armed with info on all the libraries in and around the city. Think about it - a little kid who doesn;t want to go home doesn’t have many places he can go. Coffee shops and movie theaters are off-limits. That leaves only libraries, and they’re perfect - no entrance fee, nobody getting all hot and bothered if a kid comes in. You just sit down and read whatever you want.
This is one reason the Right Wing is increasingly hostile toward libraries. As one of the few places you can go without being expected to spend money, they are a natural place for meeting, connection, and ideas, that cannot be monetized or controlled.
There is also a fun conversation between Nakata and a cat, who he names “Otsuka.”
“Otsuka?” the cat said, looking at him in surprise. “What are you talking about? Why do I have to be Otsuka?”
“No special reason. The name just came to me. Nakata just picked one out of a hat. It makes things a lot easier for me if you have a name. That way somebody like me, who isn’t very bright, can organize things better. For instance, I can say, On this day of this month I spoke with the black cat Otsuka in a vacant lot in the 2-chome neighborhood. It helps me remember.”
“Interesting,” the cat said. “Not that I totally follow you. Cats can get by without names. We go by smell, shape, things of this nature. As long as we know these things, there’s no worries for us.”
“Nakata understands completely. But you know, Mr. Otsuka, people don’t work that way. We need dates and names to remember all kinds of things.”
The cat gave a snort. “Sounds like a pain to me.”
One of my favorite passages in the book is the discussion of Adolf Eichmann. Kafka is reading one of the books in the cabin, and runs across notations by Oshima, including this one. The thing about the Eichmanns of the world is that they see life as just following orders, solving technical problems - and they have no imagination, or they would have empathy.
It’s all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It’s just like Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there’s no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just like we see here with Eichmann.
This theme becomes a thread working its way through the entire book - both narratives. There is another fascinating scene in the Johnnie Walker chapter. Walker is himself involved in this grand project - one which is terrifying and evil - but which Walker himself complains nobody respects his project. He himself has grown tired of it, but fate compels him to continue it until stopped. By….someone. He can’t commit suicide for reasons, so he has to get Nakata to do it for him. (Definite shades of Oedipus here.)
“But why - why ask me? Nakata’s never killed anyone before. It’s not the kind of thing I’m suited for.”
“I know. You’ve never killed anyone and don’t want to. But listen to me - there are times in life when those kinds of excuses don’t cut it anymore. Situations when nobody cares whether you’re suited for the task at hand or not. I need you to understand that. For instance, it happens in war.”
And that really is the question of war, isn’t it? WHY do we have to kill? A war starts and it is kill or be killed. As Walker notes, “Human history in a nutshell.”
There are several scenes which do feel like digressions - not specifically connected to the rest of the plot. I suspect they are intended to be part of the overall philosophical discussion, however.
We learn that Oshima is transgender when a pair of ostensible “radical feminists” show up at the library to make trouble. And the main way they intend to make trouble is by essentially being TERFs. (I hate the term for reasons, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)
Specifically, they are furious that there is no designated bathroom for women at the library. What there is, because the library is small and has a small number of visitors, is a single unisex bathroom that all can use.
Oshima tries to explain using some familiar analogies - bathrooms in an aircraft are all unisex, for example - but the women are determined to argue anyway.
Finally, after pages and pages of their obnoxiousness, Oshima has had enough of the accusations that he is a male sexist pig, and explains in excruciatingly graphic detail about who he is, from genitals to sexual orientation to his experience of having a male brain.
While I am sure that there are things to quibble with here in the way things are stated (and also in Kafka’s struggles to categorize Oshima in his own brain), there is a lot to like about Murakami’s respect for transgender people and identities.
Where I think that Murakami shows his age and limited experience in this passage is that he almost but not quite understands that these women aren’t feminists - they are just bigots. (Hence why I love Elaine Castillo’s description of TERFs as “Trans-exclusionary non-feminists.”)
What Murakami does get very right in this scene is the deliberately misleading and inflammatory rhetoric of anti-trans bathroom panic. The women claim that “the majority of women are reluctant to use shared bathrooms” and hints at the “all men - and especially trans women - are violent” argument as well.
Oshima correctly notes that this is literally not an issue. The number of actual bathroom assaults by transgender women is nearly zero, and in any case FAR LESS than the number committed by Republican congressmen. I mean, right now, being a sexual predator is practically a requirement to serve in the Trump Administration.
So, while not perfect, Murakami actually handles this…pretty well. Kafka indicates he doesn’t quite know how to understand Oshima, but that he accepts him fully.
“I appreciate it,” Oshima says, and lays a gentle hand on my shoulder. “I know I’m a little different from everyone else, but I’m still a human being. That’s what I’d like you to realize. I’m just a regular person, not some monster. I feel the same things everyone else does, act the same way.”
This is the truth, even if the Right Wing prefers to demonize and inflict violence on transgender people (and indeed anyone different from them.)
“I’ve experienced all kinds of discrimination,” Oshima says. “Only people who’ve been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I’m as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they’re doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don’t want to. Like that lovely pair we just me.”
Oh yes, I know too many people like that, who cannot (or will not) imagine transgender existence. Or the experience of discrimination for that matter. It is endemic on the Right these days, with its turn toward open fascism. A lack of imagination. Hollow men. And thus, gross immorality.
“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe. Of course it’s important to know what’s right and wrong. Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive. They’re a lost cause, and I don’t want anyone like that coming in here.”
Sigh. This is why I feel that my former religious tribe is a lost cause. And why I have given up on my parents ever admitting they were wrong and correcting their intolerant and judgmental minds. That whole passage describes the systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and religious bigotry that parasitized their minds over the last several decades, destroying the good people they were.
Before ending up with Hoshino, Nakata catches a variety of rides. On one of them, he finds himself hearing the life story of the driver, who admits “I’ve never talked to anyone like this before.” Each of the people who come in contact with Nakata feel strangely comfortable around him, perhaps because of his simplicity and lack of judgmentalism. Or, maybe people are like cats, and can sense the right sort of person.
Oshima gets a lot of the best philosophical lines. I wonder if a literary reason he is transgender is to fill the role of the sexless (eunuch?) wise man - he isn’t old or a real guru, but he is definitely a character who thinks a lot. Here is another great passage by him.
“Listen, Kafka. What you’re experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn’t choose fate. Fate chooses man. That’s the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist’s weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I’m getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results.”
This is part of a larger conversation about the murder of Kafka’s father. Because Kafka has an iron-clad alibi, he isn’t a suspect, but he is wanted for questioning. The problem is, in some non-linear way, Kafka did kill his father. In a dream? In the magical realm? By somehow taking possession of Nakata? Oshima calls this “poetic responsibility,” which is an interesting idea.
And then there is the problem with Kafka falling in love with the ghost of the 15-year-old Miss Saeki. (Yeah, it’s….complicated, and leads to some icky sex.)
As Oshima says, “For a fifteen-year-old who doesn’t even shave yet, you’re sure carrying a lot of baggage around.”
Believe it or not, there is yet another magical character who manifests as and calls himself “Colonel Sanders.” Who describes himself as “an idea” - not a god or being per se, and also being, of all things, a pimp. And his role in this drama is to take Hoshino to find the “entrance stone” that Nakata needs to do…whatever it is that he is supposed to do. (And if you can figure out exactly what the ending means, bully for you. I’ve read several possibilities and they are all plausible.)
One of the most hilarious lines in the book comes from Sanders:
“This time I decided to take on a familiar shape, that of a famous capitalist icon. I was toying with the idea of Mickey Mouse, but Disney’s particular about the rights to their characters.”
No kidding. Don’t ever mess with the mouse.
As if a pimping Colonel Sanders wasn’t enough, Hoshino ends up arguing with him about the existence of God.
“Yeah, but the stone is owned by God, right? He’s gonna be pissed if we take it out.”
Colonel Sanders folded his arms and stared straight at Hoshino. “What is God?”
The question threw Hoshino for a moment.
Colonel Sanders pressed him further, “What does God look like, and what does He do?”
“Don’t ask me. God’s God. He’s everywhere, watching what we do, judging whether it’s good or bad.”
“Sounds like a soccer referee.”
“Sort of, I guess.”
“So God wears shorts, has a whistle sticking out of His mouth, and keeps an eye on the clock?”
This then leads into a discussion too long for this post, about the role of the gods in Japanese life, and the way the emperor ceased to be a god because General MacArthur said so…
Throughout the book, Kafka never truly puts down roots - he carries his backpack with him whenever he goes out. (Until the ending dream sequence - another symbol perhaps.) Again, Oshima has a fascinating observation.
“That backpack’s like your symbol of freedom,” he comments.
“Guess so,” I say.
“Having an object that symbolizes freedom might make a person happier than actually getting the freedom it represents.”
Hello, America and its gun problem? And so many other things. The symbol creates the happiness more than the actual thing would.
“Perhaps,” Oshima says, as if fed up,” Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they were really set free, most people would be in a real bind. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free.”
Unfortunately, this is all too true. And people who do not wish to be free resent those who do prefer freedom.
And later, “This is pretty obvious, but until things happen, they haven’t happened. And often things aren’t what they seem.”
There are a few things in this book that are startling reminders that the setting is different. Japan is not America, for sure. I smiled at this line, from the rental car guy:
“How about a Familia? A very reliable car, and I swear nobody will notice it at all.”
The Mazda Familia was better known to us as the 323. Ironically, here, it kind of stood out as a bit less anonymous than the ubiquitous Accords and Camrys.
On the other hand, the mention of a No Fear shirt sure brought me back to the 1990s. And to the heyday of T & C Surf Co. shirts - a big thing here in southern California when I was a certain age.
I mentioned that music tends to be a crucial part of any Murakami book. Here, it plays a role in Kafka’s coming of age - Oshima introduces him to classical. Later, Hoshino is introduced to music, giving him and Oshima something in common when they finally meet. Hoshino asks if Oshima believes that music has the power to change people. For Oshima - and for Murakami himself, the answer is yes.
(Like The Violin Conspiracy, this book has an online playlist - as do most Murakami books.)
I have to mention the book’s description of mosquitoes. The whole “hiking in the woods” stuff is interesting writing, and the last scene is evocative, if a bit hazy on its meaning.
Huge black mosquitoes buzz me like reconnaissance patrols, aiming for the exposed skin around my eyes. When I hear their buzz I brush them away or squash them. Whenever I smush one it makes a squish, already bloated with blood it’s sucked out of me. It feels itchy only later. I wipe the blood off my hands on the towel around my neck.
During the long march to the dream city, or whatever it is, Kafka does a lot of thinking.
Why do people wage war? Why do hundreds of thousands, even millions of people group together and try to annihilate each other? Do people start wars out of anger? Or fear? Or are anger and fear just two aspects of the same spirit?
I wonder that too. Probably all decent people do.
And more:
A question. Why didn’t she love me? Don’t I deserve to have my mother love me?
Another one I often wonder about. Why was I so easy to throw away? Was it too much to ask to be accepted for who I was, not a fantasy of how I would fix her daddy issues?
After everything is done, Oshima has a final word that has stuck with me.
“Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that’s where I imagine it - there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.”
That’s a taste of what is in this book. I happen to enjoy Murakami, and definitely this book, despite its defects.
The translation is by Philip Gabriel, who I think captured the spirit of the writing well. (I have read translations of Murakami’s other books by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum, and I think Gabriel’s flows the best.)
I read the book in hard copy, but other members of our club listened to the audiobook. Particularly good things were said about the one with two narrators, one for each thread. I can’t remember the names, but presumably you can discover that with a bit of looking.
***
The Murakami List:
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
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