Raining Sardines, Talking Cats

To call Kafka On The Shore an imag­i­na­tive book would be gross under­state­ment. It is wildly, fever­ishly, out­ra­geously imag­i­na­tive; a book where bizarre ideas share space with pro­found thoughts and sub­lime writ­ing coex­ists with cheesy humor that this blog wouldn’t pub­lish. (Yes, I can think of at least seven really funny things I’ve rejected — I’ll write a post about it soon. Plus I am dis­ap­pointed you guys don’t know the dif­fer­ence between reviewer’s license and hyper­bole.)

“Well, tell me then , Toro, is there some rea­son you’re here?”

“There is,” the black cat said. “I thought you might be hav­ing a hard time deal­ing with that stone all alone.”

“You got that right. Def­i­nitely. I’m in kind of a fix here.”

“I thought I’d lend you a hand.”

“That would be great,” Hoshino said. “Take a paws in your sched­ule, eh?”

In other words, Kafka on the Shore is just another Haruki Murakami book. Murakami is a delight­fully inven­tive writer, and Kafka On The Shore brings together all the qual­i­ties that’ve made him so pop­u­lar with audi­ences the world over. After his “dis­cov­ery” in the mid-nineties with The Wind Up Bird Chron­i­cle, Murakami, with his dis­tinc­tive brand of writ­ing that blurs the bound­ary between what is real and what is not, has acquired almost cult sta­tus in the West. On one level, his books are dense, broody mus­ings on lone­li­ness and love; on another they are racily nar­rated fan­tasies laced with gen­er­ous (tongue-in-cheek) ref­er­ences to pop cul­ture. The dichotomy intrigues, draw­ing read­ers into the books. And the books never dis­ap­point: they are dreamy fan­tasies set in the present, and the author’s over­ac­tive imag­i­na­tion ensures that there is never a dull moment, if you’ll par­don the cliché.

Kafka on the Shore is a book about a young boy who calls him­self Kakfa (Duh!) (which means crow in Czech, apparently)(Clarification: Kafka means Crow, not Duh!). Kafka, whose mom and sis­ter had aban­doned him early on, runs away from home at fif­teen to get away from his dad. Kafka is also run­ning away from a prophecy of his dad. (The par­al­lels with Murukami’s short story in the New Yorker are obvious:

“Among the women a man meets in his life, there are only three who have real mean­ing for him. No more, no less,” his father said–or, rather, declared. He spoke coolly but with utter cer­tainty, as he might have in not­ing that the earth takes a year to revolve around the sun.

) (etcetera: We close parantheses.())

In another thread in the book, Nakata, a lov­able old man who lost his mind in a bizarre World War II inci­dent leaves Tokyo for “some­where west.” Nakata, who can talk to cats, hitch­hikes his way (rather event­fully) to where Kafka is now, pro­pelled by mys­te­ri­ous forces within his mind. He is run­ning towards some­thing, but he is also run­ning away from a grue­some mur­der that he com­mit­ted. Or did he?

Kafka ends up at a quaint lit­tle fam­ily library in a quaint lit­tle town. On the way though, he meets a girl who he thinks could be his sis­ter. And at the library, he runs into the fol­low­ing people.

1. Oshima, the über-smart library assis­tant who says mys­te­ri­ous, meta­phys­i­cal, pro­found, philo­soph­i­cal things with a straight face. Like so:

“Speak­ing of con­tra­dic­tions,” Oshima sud­denly says, “when I first met you I felt a kind of con­tra­dic­tion in you. You’re seek­ing some­thing, but at the same time you’re run­ning away for all you’re worth.” [Please nod sagely. There you go, that’s it.]

Oshima is über-smart, so quot­ing Yeats ( “In dreams begin respon­si­bil­ity”) and Aristo­phanes or draw­ing on Greek Phi­los­o­phy ( “Cassandra’s curse”) to explain every­day predica­ments comes eas­ily to him. As does hav­ing a lot of fun at the expense of a cou­ple of poor feminists:

“Yes, may I help you?” Oshima asks her amiably.

“Just to let you know, we are inves­ti­gat­ing pub­lic cul­tural facil­i­ties in the entire coun­try from a woamn’s point of view, look­ing at ease of use, fair access and other issues,” she says. “Our group is doing a year-long inves­ti­ga­tion and plans to pub­lish a report on our find­ings. A large num­ber of women are involved in this project, and the two of us hap­pen to be in charge of this region.”

[…]

“What we’ve con­cluded is that, unfor­tu­nately, this library has sev­eral issues which need to be addressed.”

“From the view­point of women, is what you’re say­ing,” Oshima commented.

“Cor­rect, from the view­point of women,” the woman answers. She clears her throat.

[…]

“Well, first of all you have no toi­let set aside for women. That’s cor­rect, isn’t it?”

‘Yes, that’s right. There’s no women’s toi­let in this library. We have one toi­let for the use of both men and women.”

“Even if you are a pri­vate insti­tu­tion, since you’re open to the pub­lic don’t you think — in prin­ci­ple — that you should pro­vide sep­a­rate toi­lets for women and men?”

“In prin­ci­ple?” Oshima says.

“Cor­rect. Shared facil­i­ties give rise to all sorts of harass­ment. Accord­ing to our sur­vey, the major­ity of women are reluc­tant to use shared toi­lets. This is a clear cae of neglect of your female patrons.”

“Neglect…” Oshima says, and makes a face as though he’s swal­lowed some­thing bit­ter by mis­take He doesn’t much like the sound of the word, it would seem.

“An inten­tional oversight.”

“Inten­tional over­sight,” he repeats, and gives some thought to this clumsy phrase.

“So what is your reac­tion to all this?” the woman asks, barely con­tain­ing her irritation.

“As you can see,” Oshima says, “we’re a very small library. And unfor­tu­nately we don’t have the sapce for sep­a­rate toi­lets. Nat­u­rally it would be bet­ter to have sep­a­rate toi­lets, but none of our patrons has ever com­plained. For bet­ter or for worse, our library doesn’t get very crowded. If you’d like to pur­sue this issue of sep­a­rate toi­lets fur­ther, I sug­gest you got to the Boe­ing head­quartes inSeat­tle and addreess the issue of toi­lets on 747s. A 747’s much big­ger than our lit­tle library, and much more crowded. As far as I’m aware, all toi­lets on pas­sen­ger air­craft are shared by men and women.”

“The tall woman frowns at him severely, her cheek­bones jjut­ting for­ward and her glasses rid­ing up her nose. “We are not inves­ti­gat­ing aero­planes. 747s are beside the point.”

“Wouldn’t toi­lets in both jets and in our library — in prin­ci­ple — give rise to the same sorts of problems?”

“We are inves­ti­gat­ing, one by one, pub­lic facil­i­ties. We’re not here to argue over principles.

“Oshmias’s sup­ple smile never fades dur­ing this exchange. “Is that so?” I could have sworn that prin­ci­ples were exactly what we were discussing.”

And so it goes. An exchange that later veers towards a dis­cus­sion of red her­rings, shift­ing analo­gies, Aris­to­tle and phal­lo­cen­tric logi­ci­cal fal­lac­ies before it ends with a rev­e­la­tion that would’ve been explo­sive in any other book. Here, com­ing after sar­dines rain­ing and a dog inter­rupt­ing Nakata’s con­ver­sa­tion with a cat to lead him to a man dressed like Johnny Walker (whisky mogul, evil cat eater) who pro­ceeds to eat live cat hearts, it is just another event. Murakami’s world is full of them.

Oshima is the reader’s muse in the book — eru­dite and unruf­fled, he “explains” (if you can call bits of tan­gen­tial loud think­ing that) what is going on to both Kafka and us.

2. (etcetera:we get our num­ber­ing right).

3. On the bus out of Tokyo, Oshima also meets Sakura, a hot young girl who he thinks could be his sister.Naturally. Kafka and Sakura form a bond on the bus, and later on, Kafka rapes her in his dream. But dreams blur into real­ity in this book, so one can’t really be sure. Sakura and Kafka carry on a con­ver­sa­tion that might explain the pre­pon­der­ance of alarm­ing coin­ci­dences in the book.

“Even chance meet­ings… Are the result of Karma.”

“Right, right,” she says. “But what does it mean?”

“That things in life are fated by our pre­vi­ous lives. That even the in the small­est events there’s no such thing as coincidence.”

4. And finally, Miss Saeki. She is the stately woman with a sad past she won’t dis­cuss, who runs the library that Oshima works in. Kafka, nat­u­rally, thinks she could be his mom. There are tan­ta­liz­ing clues that seem to point to the the­ory — Miss Saeki was a light­ning researcher and Kafka’s dad was once struck by light­ning. But when Kafka asks her the ques­tion, all he gets is some­thing to the effect of “You already know the answer to that.” And he accepts the answer and moves on. Occa­sion­ally, Miss Saeki becomes a fif­teen year old girl and dons shiny white cos­tumes and goes to Kafka’s room. This con­fuses Kafka no end, and his dis­cus­sions with Oshima about Miss Saeki lead to the con­clu­sion that this is prob­a­bly a “liv­ing ghost.” The title of the book — Kafka on the Shore, is also the title of the hit sin­gle that Miss Saeki com­posed when she was young. The lyrics of the song are rid­dled with sym­bol­ism, and Kafka’s sees a lot of par­al­lels between his life and the lyrics. And so on it goes…

Meah­while, hitch­hik­ing old man Nakata, after caus­ing leeches to fall from the sky, ends up at the same town as Kafka, by sheer chance. Nakata has for­got­ten first per­son usage, so con­ver­sa­tions with him remind you of con­ver­sa­tions between Elaine and Jimmy.

Nakata is sleepy.

A truck dri­ver who picks him up on the way is intrigued by Nakata and decides to accom­pany him on his quest for some­thing that also hap­pens to be — by chance — men­tioned in Miss Saeki’s hit single.

The truck dri­ver, Hoshino, later encoun­ters a spirit dressed up as Colonel Sanders. Colonel Sanders has a slightly dif­fer­erent job descrip­tion here: he is a super­nat­ural pimp, who gets Hoshino a girl that is very adept at quot­ing Henri Berg­son and Hegel. Together, Hoshino and the pros­ti­tute find the per­fect use for philosopy.

“See, you’re ready to go again,” the girl remarked, slowly segu­ing into her next set of motions. “Any spe­cial reqeusts? Some­thing you’d like me to do? Mr. Sanders asked me to make sure you got every­thing you wanted.”

“I can’t think of any­thing spe­cial, but could you quote some more of that phi­los­o­phy stuff? I don’t know why, but it might keep me from com­ing so quickly. Oth­er­wise, I’ll lose it pretty fast.”

“Let’s see … This is fairly old, but how about some Hegel?”

“What­ever.”

[…]

“‘At the same time that “I” am the con­tent of a rela­tion, “I” am also that which does the relating.’”

The hilar­i­ous encoun­ters between Sanders and Hoshino are the fun­ni­est parts of the book, with Murakami at his bit­ing best.

“Lis­ten — God only exists in people’s minds. Espe­cially in Japan God’s always been a kind of flex­i­ble con­cept. Look at what hap­pened after the war. Doug­nal MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, mak­ing a speech say­ing he was just an ordi­nary per­son. So after 1946 he wasn’t God any­more. That’s what Japan­ese gods are like — they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some Amer­i­can chomp­ing on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o — God’s no longer God. A very post­mod­ern kind of thing. if you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Typ­i­cal of Murakami, when the denou­ment comes (and goes), it leaves you with more ques­tions than answers. Some philo­soph­i­cal, some prac­ti­cal. (“Was there a mes­sage in all this?” “What is he try­ing to say?” “Was Miss Saeki Kafka’s mom?”). What is the point, the over­ar­ch­ing expla­na­tion that ties it all up? How could Hoshino start talk­ing to cats? Was the stone the entrance to heaven? What is the sig­nif­i­cance of the par­adise like land sus­pended between two worlds? Is this a fable? Or like a reviewer claims, is the whole book about giv­ing shape to inter­nal thoughts of the characters?

But then, a lit­tle bit of thought pro­vides the answer: It doesn’t mat­ter. There is so much fun to be had when read­ing the book, and some more fun think­ing about all the ques­tions, and that could very well be the whole point.

New York Times Fea­tured Author Profile.