The below blog post is spoiler free up until the warning xxx.

I’ve just finished Kafka on the shore, the third title I’ve read by Murakami, and I’m a little lost for words. To say that the book deals with some heavy materials is naïve. It really wasn’t easy for me to handle much of what the book has to offer at first; you have to sort of embrace it wholly or you won’t be able to sit with it.

The titular Kafka is a teenage runaway from an upper-middle class home in Tokyo. He embarks on a journey accross the country at age 15 with no particular destination in mind. Relayed in parallel are the stories of peculiar events unfolding in a small village in wartime Japan, and the asymptotic odyssey of Nakata, an elderly disabled man who, as it so happens, can talk to cats.

Kafka on the shore takes the lines we’ve drawn between dreams, ghosts, metaphor, prophecy and reality, and does away with them completely, in a very literal sense. “In dreams begin responsibilities”. This is not a book for the reader who fusses over plot holes. Contradictions are integral to the tale. Simultaneously, the book makes perfect sense: at no point did the book become so complicated as to annoy. Nakata simply can talk to cats, people can be in two places at the same time, and in two times at the same place, these are true, and we must deal with them.

This is a story of how grief, guilt, love and trauma can consume a person; and how that confusion can spiral a person around to new places, where the objective reality and stablity of normal life goes all hazy. It’s a heartbreaking book for someone like me, who, normally reads sci-fi, comedy, maths texts. I wouldn’t recommend it per se, I know that there have been times in my life where reading this book could have hurt me, but if you’re feeling up to the task, it’s definitely worth the read.

Spoilers from here on out!!! Scroll for remainder

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Kafka & Oshima

Coming into the book, I was expecting the classic weirdness from Murakami apropos women, and it is there for sure. (I don’t think I need to mention how weird that gets) But I was not expecting the positively portrayed trans character? And a trans-man at that, who are so rarely portrayed in media. Oshima is probably the most likeable character in the book. He really does no wrong (bar maybe forgiving miss Saeki a little too easily for that particular felony offence). Oshima deals in the novel with something akin to dysphoria. He talks in great detail of his own body and how he doesn’t particulatly take to it. (I think he might even call it a vessel).

This detail gives Oshima even more strength as a mentor to Kafka who deals, throughout the book, with his own dysphoria. Kafka doesn’t feel like he belongs in his own body, and works actively to grow into the body of an adult. He’s obsessed with adulthood and one of his main barriers to that state of existence is his body. Oshima rejects the order forced on him that he must live as a woman in a woman’s body, and shows Kafka what kind of transcendence is possible. Unfortunately, like all of his obsessions, Kafka’s desire of his adult body manifests in his relationship with Miss Saeki. This is, I believe, an instance of what Oshima talks about when he’s discussing the tendency for heroes to fall due to their strengths and passions, rather than to their faults.

This ties in, obviously, to the Oedipus narrative present in the book. Kafka’s father dooms his son to the fate of Oedipus Rex, declaring that he will lie with his mother and sister, and kill his father. I’m not sure whether this was truly fated in the book. In the original Greek tale the curse was always going to befall the hero but in Kafka on the shore, the protagonist is so fatalistic as to try to force these events to occur, so that he might at least feel some control. These tragedies take the podium spots for most disturbing scenes in the book. Kafka embodies Nakata’s rage at the Johnnie walker scene, invites a deranged, sleeping, miss Saeki to sleep with him, and, watches in his dream as he sexually assaults Sakura.

These three scenes all have the common thread of responsibility in dreams. Each tragedy unfolds in a metaphor, apparition, dream or other. In each case the details of the scene may be sanitised. Miss saeki is not his real mother, sakura not his sister, he couldn’t have physically killed his father, he may not have truly slept with miss saeki, and the sakura scene was in a dream. Nonetheless, in the world of the book, all of these things did, truly happen. In a truer sense than the standard sense, Sakura is his sister, and what he saw really happened, Saeki is his mother, and they slept together, and he stabbed his father. So Kafka bears the guilt for these actions.

It is, of course, not fair that this child carries this. He’s only 15, and he’s probably the most traumatised character in the book. In the end when Kafka forgives his mother for abandoning him with his abusive father, I believe he becomes absolved of this guilt, or moreso that he is now responsible for it, rather than buried by it. All he can do is accept, forgive himself and others, and move forward.

Nakata & Hoshino

Nakata serves the plot as an object, rather than a subject. When the book tackles a bit of Hegel, it grapples with the idea of identity being contructed from the interplay of object-subject (slave-master) relations. Nakata struggles with a deep pain because he is treated in society as a mere object due to his disabilty. His family barely consider him beyond finances. He’s abused in the home as a child and then struck by his teacher in school during the war. In parallel, he is treated cosmically as an object too. He has no choices in the story, he’s just pushed around by the forces guiding him. He has to see terrible things and is very rarely understood.

Nakata, along with Miss Saeki, have become cosmic objects due to their interactions with the entrance stone, giving each of them dim shadows. This fixes both of them in place, stuck in time and unable to progress of their own accord. As a result, both characters become incredibly still, almost unphased by the passage of time. Unfortunately this affliction also ensures that, when the time comes to act, and the act is completed, both characters must die.

As Nakata’s Odyessey advances, he becomes unstuck in time. He is met with the kindness of strangers; the people around him don’t merely pity him, but respect him. His greatest companion, hoshino, considers Nakata on the same level as Beethoven in terms of brilliance. Nakata’s candor and empathy creates a warm environment in which Hoshino can prosper; his stillness and relaxed attitude enables Hoshino to reflect on his life and to sit down for a few weeks and experience literature and art. Despite all of Nakata’s wonderful qualities, he was so badly treated in life that he seemingly never directed his empathy inwards; it seems to me that another tragedy of the book is that he should stay still for so long in pain, and to only spend a few weeks in caring company, that it isn’t enough to let him love himself.

Notes

There is much more about the book which I’m not smart enough to really formulate. Something something to be loved is to be changed. idk.

There’s something incredible about Murakami’s creation of this place that Kafka goes, where eveything is crazy and his whole identity gets destroyed for a bit. He sort of goes insane and doesn’t pass much heed of what’s real and what’s not. I feel the exact same way when big changes happen in my life, just a few months go by where everything is a sad messy blur and then one day you’re back? Not sure if that’s the right way to phrase it but it really spoke to me ig!