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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Too much of "Kafka on the Shore" can be summed up by "X may or may not be ...": Nakata may or not be an older version of Kafka. The girl Kafka meets on a long bus ride may or may not be his lost sister. The woman who runs the library where he finds a refuge and a job may or not be his lost mother. Nakata may or may not have killed an evil spirit who may or may not be Kafka's father.
Murakami is too refined, too unadorned a writer for "Kafka on the Shore" to go spinning off into incomprehensibility. And if I read him right, the conclusions he's reached here are homiletic: The world offers no promises of safety; knowing ourselves means knowing the worst we are capable of; regret for the past deadens us to the present; and, most strongly, a full life means running the risk of encountering the pain and violence the world holds.
The combination of pat lessons and loose narrative threads might be a fatal one for any book, especially a book as big (nearly 500 pages) as this one. But I loved reading "Kafka on the Shore." The book may not, finally, add up (or not to anything deep), but it never feels hackneyed. Murakami has written a novel where the fantastic is trite and the everyday is profound.
Throughout "Kafka on the Shore," Murakami's writing strikes a singular balance between the ascetic and the sensual. A simple meal, a nap, the feeling of lying in the sun, the satisfying sweat you develop from exercise, the joy of having books to read -- in other words, some of the simplest pleasures you can imagine -- are rendered with the type of simplicity that only comes from extraordinary refinement. (Perhaps Murakami writes so beautifully about sex because, as with the fantasy elements of his novels, he treats it naturally, not as something apart from life.) Murakami, a great jazz fan, does something in his prose comparable to what Miles Davis did in his great '50s work: His notes are spare but so carefully chosen that together they feel rich. You don't think about what has been eliminated but about the essence that has been distilled into the unadorned words.
There are moments in "Kafka on the Shore" that could feel impossibly sappy. Hoshino, the truck driver who accompanies Nakata on his quest, wanders at one point into a deserted cafe and suddenly finds himself enraptured by the Rubinstein, Heifetz and Feuermann recording of Beethoven's "Archduke Trio." Around the same time he goes on the spur of the moment to a double bill of "The 400 Blows" and "Shoot the Piano Player" and finds himself responding to the movies unlike any he's ever bothered with. This is the kind of awakening usually reserved for adolescent characters. It's unusual to read it happening to an adult character, and I think it's significant, heartening, a show of faith on the author's part that culture is not something reserved for the select few but is open to anyone who opens themselves to it.
Unexpected relationships are at the heart of the book, the relation between Hoshino and strange old Nakata, between Kafka and Oshima, between Kafka and Miss Saeki, the director of the library he settles in. Murakami places great weight on empathy. Time and again characters reveal secrets about themselves, the sort that could put barriers between them. (Oshima, in particular, has a secret that in lesser hands could have turned him into a freak or an object of pity; instead it makes him seem an even rarer bird than he is.) Those secrets are the tests Murakami puts before his characters, to see if they are worthy of inclusion in his book. It's not a snobbish test. It's the writer's way of saying these are the people he chooses to spend time with. He's not interested, here at least, in characters who can't make that simple leap of empathy.
In big ways, "Kafka on the Shore" doesn't work. The ways in which it consistently does work, taken together, are a bigger accomplishment than the book's fuzzy and banal themes. It's the summations Murakami works toward that are unsatisfying here. The countless moments in which he writes of life as a gift could almost be plunked down in stories as prayerlike as Jean Giono's "The Man Who Planted Trees" and feel right at home. Murakami is one of those rare writers who can render contentment without making it feel like complicity. And one of the rarer ones who can make decency attractive.
