Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami

Two alternating parallel narratives over the course of 436 pages gradually converge without ever quite meeting. In one of them a 15-year-old boy estranged from his father runs away from home. In the other an elderly man, who can talk to cats, goes on a strange quest to a distant city. Early in the novel Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami, we read of an incident that occurred in 1943 at the height of the Second World War. A teacher takes her young students on a hike in the hills to hunt for mushrooms. She sees a small object glinting metallically in the distant sky. Suddenly, the children fall to the ground, unconscious. Gradually all but one wake up and appear unharmed. The one who does not awaken is taken to a hospital. The teacher never sees him again. We eventually infer that this strange event has a connection to one of the narrative strands. We infer as well that this event has a connection to other concerns in the novel. In a novel such as this, with interwoven narratives, strange happenings, portentous events, we expect at some point an explanation. Murakami tantalizes us with the possibility of an explanation, but it never comes. Instead we get something quite different, something frustrating, perhaps, but something more than satisfying.

One might argue that there is a strong supernatural dimension in this novel or a dimension of science fiction or of fantasy or folklore or a combination of all four. In American novels these genres might provide appropriate ways to categorize Kafka on the Shore. In particular, the style of this novel might be described as magical realism. But this is not an American novel—neither North nor South American--and the mythic traditions it incorporates are not American either. The sense of fantasy that underlies this novel is Japanese, and therefore unfamiliar to a Western reader. But the frustration and the unfamiliarity are part of the pleasure of this book.

Kafka on the Shore offers two main characters, each inhabiting one of the two narratives. One is the 15-year-old teenager who calls himself Kafka: that is not his real name. He is estranged from his father, a famous sculptor, and they have no real relationship at all. Kafka has problems at school, and one day he decides to run away. He is precocious and well read, and he makes his way to a distant city. He finds a job in a library and becomes friends with a man named Oshima, who turns out to be a woman -- a kind of androgyne -- who simply lacks a specific gender. Oshima is a good friend and mentor to Kafka; there is no sexual relationship or potential for one between them. Kafka also becomes friends with a much older woman named Miss Saeki. She has a tragic and romantic background and maybe as well a connection to Kafka.

In the other narrative the main character is Nakata, an old man who describes himself as simple and stupid. He talks about himself in the third person as if he cannot speak in the first person (very rarely he does). He cannot read. He doesn't have a job, although he used to have one, and he spends most of his time hunting for lost cats, for which he is paid by their owners. He remembers that as a little boy he was much smarter and that he could read but that at some point he became ill and lost his ability to read along with much of his intelligence.

There are also characters named Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders. They are not only named after the name brands: they are those brands incarnate.

To go far in discussing the plot of this novel would be to ruin the experience of the book. Even as the reading of it proves to be confusing, it's also pleasurable. One hopes for an explanation, a resolution, for some sort of tying together on a literal level of the disparate strands of this novel. One can't really say that resolution ever occurs. But on a metaphoric level and certainly in terms of characters, there is resolution of a sort. Once again, it's difficult to categorize this resolution in the traditional terms of Western literature. But it's a resolution nonetheless.

In ways, this is a coming-of-age novel for the character Kafka, but it's clearly not a coming-of-age novel for Nakata, who has come to the end of his life or close to it and who carries out in the course of the narrative certain tasks for which his life has apparently been destined. This is also a novel about memory, though the memories are not always ones of which the characters consciously are aware. It is also a novel about synchronicity, about how events come together either by accident or by intention, events seemingly unrelated in space and time and in their very nature. This is part of the confusion of the novel. Yet it's an entrancing confusion.

There's a particular moment in the novel that recalls William Faulkner's story "The Bear," a chapter in his 1941 novel Go Down, Moses. Kafka is staying for a few days in a cabin deep in an isolated woods. He has been taken there by Oshima, who shares ownership of the cabin with his brother. Kafka has been warned not to go into the woods because they are extremely thick and it is easy to become lost in them. He hears a story about Japanese soldiers on training exercises in these woods before World War II: they become lost and were never seen again. Kafka, who does not lack self-assurance, goes into the woods on several occasions. On the last occasion he goes very deep. He marks his way with paint he sprays on the trunks of trees, but he comes to a point where he knows that truly to enter the woods, he'll have to put aside the paint and the other articles of civilization that he's brought along with him, and he does so. (This echoes Isaac McCaslin in "The Bear" when he tracking the bear and realizes that his compass, rifle, and his snake stick are preventing him from truly entering into the wilderness. He puts them down and walks on and immediately sees the bear for the first time).

Perhaps it's at this point in the novel, when Kafka wanders deep into the woods and comes to a strange village, that we truly enter the realm of fantasy. At least this scene more than any other challenges our sense of reality. What transpires here is not at all out of sync with the rest of the novel. It’s consistent with the logic of the novel, yet at the same time it exceeds the boundaries of what we are prepared to accept in a novel. Nonetheless, it's an important part of the resolution and of Kafka’s movement towards full assumption of his identity and his destiny.