etcetera

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.

“And so,” the snotty bunch of haz­ers asked him, “do you read?”

“Yes sirs,” he said. Knight­hood by coercion.

“What’s your favorite genre?” I asked, gaz­ing at the immense fore­head. “I was born with a large fore­head, and no, that is not a reced­ing hair­line, you jerk” he would tell me later, when we had become friends.

But going back to now, his answer was “Sci­ence fic­tion. Asi­mov. Long pause. Sirs.”

We groaned.

Sci­ence fic­tion, in that lit­tle clique, was passé. It was bor­ing and juve­nile, a resort of failed fan­tasy writ­ers (it was either that or . Worlds with scary green faced aliens and half baked sci­en­tific the­o­ries on time travel weren’t gonna cut it, not for hard nosed young men who could smoke a whole Ben­son & Hedges with­out cough­ing. By the way, we are a socially respon­si­ble blog and would like inform you that smok­ing in Bhutan can land you in jail, unless you are the king.

“Yes,” we said, “Foun­da­tion was good. Dick was good too.” Sti­fled laugh­ter. “But that’s it. No new ideas any­more, and how many vari­a­tions on time travel can you read ?”

“No, but …”

“Why do we get the sense you are try­ing to con­tra­dict us?”

“I mean yes… sirs. SF is not a hap­pen­ing field. I agree wholeheartedly.”

It has been a few years since the con­ver­sa­tion hap­pened, and I wish I could go back in time and take the side of the young man with a reced­ing hair­line and tell the oth­ers to go read Cyber­punk. That’ll only hap­pen in bad sci­ence fic­tion, so I’ll have to make do with a trib­ute to Neal Stephen­son.

The prob­lem with sci-fi (we all thought) was that it took itself too seri­ously. ‘Twas a genre lost in its gad­gets, a genre enam­ored with its clair­voy­ance, a genre filled with stuffy geek-writers who believed that mediocre plots could be trans­formed into clas­sics when set in the future in imag­i­nary plan­ets. Mar­garet Atwood helped weaken the impres­sion (you can’t really call her works sci­ence fic­tion, so scratch that) and William Gib­son broke its resolve, but Neal Stephen­son shat­tered it, burnt the rem­nants and shot the ashes up in the air with the weapons that he invented in Snow Crash. He did this by adding one ingre­di­ent to his books: irrev­er­ent satire. A self dep­re­cat­ing tone. Scathing social com­men­tary. Intrigu­ing new social orders, a healthy inter­est in the flow of money, an aware­ness of the impact of tech­nol­ogy on peo­ple. Ok, I was off by a few ingre­di­ents. Big deal.

His books are elab­o­rately plot­ted and incred­i­bly detailed ( and very long), draw­ing on ideas from sev­eral sources: Snow Crash blends in vir­tual real­ity with notions of a lib­er­tar­ian future, The Dia­mond Age is about society’s response to nan­otech­nol­ogy. The com­plex­ity of the ideas is bal­anced by the irrev­er­ent, satir­i­cal tone of the nar­ra­tive — Stephenson’s books never take them­selves too seri­ously. And that endears them to you — a self dep­re­cat­ing geek dis­cussing his ideas with pas­sion is much more lik­able than some­one earnestly try­ing to sell sto­ries about plants that grow on Mars. This excerpt from Snow Crash is typ­i­cal of how Stephen­son treats con­ven­tional sci­ence fic­tion , turn­ing hack­neyed ideas into fun.

The Deliv­er­a­tor belongs to an élite order, a hal­lowed sub­cat­e­gory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is prepar­ing to carry out his third mis­sion of the night. His uni­form is black as acti­vated char­coal, fil­ter­ing the very light out of the air. A bul­let will bounce off its arach­nofiber weave like a wren hit­ting a patio door, but excess per­spi­ra­tion wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed for­est. Where his body has bony extrem­i­ties, the suit has sin­tered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, pro­tects like a stack of tele­phone books.

When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliv­er­a­tor never deals in cash, but some­one might come after him any­way — might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aero-styled, light­weight, the kind of a gun a fash­ion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the veloc­ity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cig­a­rette lighter, because it runs on electricity.

The Deliv­er­a­tor never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila High­lands. Some punks in Gila High­lands, a fancy Bur­b­clave, wanted them­selves a deliv­ery, and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliv­er­a­tor with a base­ball bat. The Deliv­er­a­tor took out his gun, cen­tered its laser doo-hickey on that poised Louisville Slug­ger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The mid­dle third of the base­ball bat turned into a col­umn of burn­ing saw­dust accel­er­at­ing in all direc­tions like a burst­ing star. Punk ended up hold­ing this bat han­dle with milky smoke pour­ing out the end. Stu­pid look on his face. Didn’t get noth­ing but trou­ble from the Deliverator.

The Deliverator’s car has enough poten­tial energy packed into its bat­ter­ies to fire a pound of bacon into the Aster­oid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gap­ing, gleam­ing, pol­ished sphinc­ters. When the Deliv­er­a­tor puts the ham­mer down, shit hap­pens. You want to talk con­tact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny con­tact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with con­tact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliv­er­a­tor is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Why is the Deliv­er­a­tor so equipped? Because peo­ple rely on him. He is a roll model. This is Amer­ica. Peo­ple do what­ever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a prob­lem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fuck­ing stop them.

Just when you think “Bond wannabe”, you find out. That the Deliv­er­a­tor deliv­ers piz­zas in a world run by cor­po­ra­tions. That the deliv­er­a­tor is a soft­ware engi­neer with atti­tude. And you grin, shake your head and move on to the next chap­ter about Gov­ern­ment­less worlds.

The Deliv­er­a­tor used to make soft­ware. Still does, some­times. But if life were a mel­low ele­men­tary school run by well-meaning edu­ca­tion Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: “Hiro is so bright and cre­ative but needs to work harder on his coöper­a­tion skills.”

After Snow­crash and The Dia­mond Age — Cyber­punk Clas­sics — Stephen­son changed tack. Crypto­nom­i­con, his follow-up book, isn’t really Sci­ence Fic­tion, it is a “his­tor­i­cal techno-thriller.” It is an out­stand­ing book that has been has been com­pared in its breadth and scope to Gravity’s Rain­bow, Thomas Pynchon’s dense World War II clas­sic. But Stephen­son won’t mind it being called Sci­ence Fiction:

“The sci­ence fic­tion approach doesn’t mean it’s always about the future; it’s an aware­ness that this is dif­fer­ent.” [Link]

The book

fol­lows two par­al­lel sagas: that of cryp­tog­ra­phers dur­ing World War II attempt­ing to crack Axis codes and that of their descen­dants attempt­ing to use mod­ern cryp­tog­ra­phy to build a data haven in the fic­ti­tious state of Kinakuta, a small nation […]. It also details the polit­i­cal machi­na­tions that fol­low both efforts. [Link]

A much more con­fi­dent Stephen­son digresses heav­ily, includ­ing a point­less short story writ­ten by one of the char­ac­ters and Perl source code for a cryp­to­graphic algo­rithm he describes in the book. The book is a delight­ful read, each digres­sion a source of unex­pected plea­sure. Stephen­son blends in his fic­tional pro­to­gan­ists with real life peo­ple: Dr. Water­house, his cryp­tog­ra­pher hero spends time with Alan Tur­ing, and Ein­stein and Churchill make cameo appear­ances as them­selves. Crypto­nom­i­con is smart, supremely funny and densely packed with ideas and an acute aware­ness of the sev­eral soci­eties spanned by the plot.

[…]When he does get to the right floor, thought, it is a bit posher than the wrong one was. Of course, the under­ly­ing struc­ture of every­thing in Eng­land is post. There is no in between with these peo­ple. You have to walk a mile to find a tele­phone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the sense­less dyna­mit­ing of pay phones had been a seri­ous prob­lem at some­time in the past. And a British mail­box can pre­sum­ably stop a Ger­man tank. None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts. The con­cept of stamp­ing out a whole lot of cars is unthinkable.

[…]Water­house has for­got­ten all of their names. He always imme­di­ately for­gets the names. Even if he remem­bered them, he would not know their sig­nif­i­cance, as he does not actu­ally have the orga­ni­za­tion chart of the For­eign Min­istry (which runs Intel­li­gence) and the Mil­i­tary laid out in front of him. They keep say­ing “woe to hice!” but just as he actu­ally begins to feel sorry for this Hice fel­low, who­ever he is, he fig­ures out that this is how they pro­nounce “Water­house.” Other than that, the one remark that actu­ally pen­e­trates his brain is when one of the Other Guys says some­thing about the Prime Min­is­ter that implies con­sid­er­able famil­iar­ity. And he’s not even the Main guy. The Main Guy is much older and more dis­tin­guished. So it seems to Water­house (though he has com­pletely stopped lis­ten­ing to what all of these peo­ple are say­ing to him) that a good half of the peo­ple in the room have recently had con­ver­sa­tions with Win­ston Churchill.

And per­haps in response to crit­i­cism that he couldn’t tie up his plots prop­erly, Stephen­son ends Crypto­nom­i­con well, tying up most loose ends. An awe­some, awe­some read.

A review of Crypto­nom­i­con at Slash­dot.

Which brings us to the Baroque Cycle, his ambi­tious tril­ogy set in the early 18^th cen­tury. Stephen­son insists that the Baroque Cycle is still Sci­ence Fic­tion, because the book mostly focuses on sci­ence in the Baroque Era. Hmm. He con­tin­ues using the tech­nique of blend­ing in fic­ti­tious peo­ple with real ones — the duel between New­ton and Leib­niz forms the back­drop for a large part of the cycle.

It is not Crypto­nom­i­con, but it is a fine book nev­er­the­less. Even though it feels a bit like read­ing a smart schoolboy’s scrap­book filled with news­pa­per clip­pings from the 17^th cen­tury, the writ­ing sparkles, and the char­ac­ters intrigue. (And the sec­ond book in the tril­ogy is set in eigh­teenth cen­tury India, which is another rea­son to read it).

And the books are also… you know what, this post is way too long. So with­out much ado, I’ll conclude.

There­fore, I con­clude, Neal Stephen­son is a good writer who writes elab­o­rately plot­ted sci­ence fic­tion full of irrev­er­ent humor. Hence, I infer, you will all go read his books and write your own reviews. Please wipe your glazed eyes and go back to your own blogs. If you are a came through google, sorry, no naked pic­tures exist on this blog, except on one post. Con­tinue searching.