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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Haruki Murakami's latest novel unveils a world in which the fantastic is trite and the everyday profound.
Jan 21, 2005 | For all the fantastic and farcical happenings in Haruki Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore" -- amnesia that renders the one who suffers it capable of talking with cats; an evil spirit building a flute of stolen souls, both human and animal; another spirit, this one a benevolent pimp, disguised as Colonel Sanders; a woman whose longing for the lost love of her youth gives rise to a ghost of her younger self; fish and leeches raining from the sky; two Japanese soldiers from World War II standing guard in a forest at the gates to the afterlife -- it's the most ordinary things that attain poetry and weight.
I came fairly late to Murakami (and still haven't caught up) because I confess to being one of those readers who, hearing that a novel contains elements of fantasy and the surreal, imagine something that's impossibly arch while straining to inspire wonder. Even those of us who are turned off by the drabness of much contemporary realist fiction don't particularly want to read books about spouses that become pets, or goldfish who are really the Buddha, or gardens that contain entrances to subway stations.
Murakami escapes the forced winsomeness that often hampers novelists who dabble in the fantastic, largely because the deceptive plainness of his language makes the sudden appearance of something strange as matter of fact as stopping off for a cup of coffee. With the exception of one episode so grotesque it throws you out of the novel, none of the oddball things that happen in the course of "Kafka on the Shore" stick out. They don't add up, either, but this is one of those novels where the book the author seems to think he's writing is less affecting than the one he's actually written.
Temperamentally, "Kafka on the Shore" is a coming-of-age story. On his 15th birthday, Kafka Tamura, the son of a famous sculptor, leaves home and heads north. The reasons seem, at first, typically adolescent. Kafka feels he doesn't fit in at the upscale private school he goes to. He feels suffocated by his father and bereft of any real connection to him. Kafka says his plan is to "journey to a far-off town, and live in a corner of a small library." And that's just what he does. The town he settles in has a private estate that's been turned into a public library. Kafka befriends Oshima, the library's pin-neat assistant, and winds up living in a spare room in the former mansion, doing minimal chores in exchange for a roof over his head and the chance to be surrounded by books.
Less easily classifiable circumstances creep into the narrative. Part of what drives Kafka from home is the desire to find the mother who deserted the family years before, taking Kafka's small sister with her. The boy is also fearful of an Oedipal prophecy his own father made to him at a young age. Kafka's father has told him that he (Kafka) will murder his father and sleep with his mother. And the father goes Sophocles one better by claiming Kafka will sleep with his sister as well.
Alternating chapters with Kafka's story is the tale of Nakata, a gentle old pensioner who lost the ability to read and write after a childhood accident and who lives simply and contentedly by himself, making a little extra money by searching for lost cats. He's especially suited for that task because he's able to converse with cats.
Had I not yet read Murakami and came upon that bit of information in a review or on the jacket copy, I'd flip the page and reason that this book wasn't going to be on my night table anytime soon. But, again, Murakami introduces the conceit with little fanfare: "'Hello there,' the old man called out. The large, elderly black tomcat raised its head a fraction and wearily returned the greeting in a low voice." And so we're into a conversation between a man and a cat before we have time to object. And the scene proceeds so smoothly, so uninterested in any cutesy effect that might be wrung from it, that you simply go with it.
You go, too, with the stranger things that follow. After a violent episode occurs in the course of Nakata's locating a lost cat (too horrendous to support the tired moral lesson it seems to be relating; if I have to have a moral lesson, can't it come without animals being tortured?), the old man sets out on a journey because there is something he must do. What that is or even where he will have to do it, he doesn't know. All he knows is that he'll know the place and the task when he finds it. Hoshino, a young trucker who gives him a ride part of the way, ends up Nakata's traveling companion and protector, drawn into Nakata's vague quest, gradually realizing he's happy to go along.
