“Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami
How do you enthusiastically describe one of the weirdest stories ever written, but without spoiling any details?
You know a book is special when the mood of the book spilled over to your real life unconsciously. That’s how it felt for me during the 4 days I’m reading this book. It was as if I live in a dream state filled with omens, where nothing is concrete and time is none existent, where life is actually a metaphor.
This strange feeling is derived from the incredible story about a boy that gave himself the nickname Kafka, who ran away from home at the age of 15 and travelled to a faraway town of Takamatsu in the Shikoku island. No friends, no family, just himself in an unfamiliar place. The boy had no clue why he chose Takamatsu of all places, a small town miles away from his home in Tokyo. But as the story progresses, we will see that it was exactly where he is supposed to be.
It is a story filled with wonder and contemplation, with cluelessness and doubts, with sophisticated conversations about the meaning of life, of love and lost, of dealing with pain, and the existentialist question of who we are and what our purpose in life is.
These themes are portrayed through the strongest of characters in the book, a dumb simpleton, a crazy artist, a meticulous androgyny, a grieving soul, and more; all wrapped in a highly intriguing narrative with riddles that makes it hard to predict what will come next.
Two narratives, in fact, where from the beginning the book tells two separate stories intermittently between the chapters with one story in odd chapters and the other in even chapters: one is about a young boy looking ahead and the other is about an old man looking behind, both of whom will never meet with each other, but with a significant crossover of their stories in few chapters before they brilliantly went to their separate paths again.
Moreover, this book is also a projection of Murakami’s vast knowledge on literature. You see, for a 15 year-old Kafka is a stand up guy that can take care of himself, he’s pretty disciplined about his health and his fitness, but the number one thing that is most appealing about him is his love for reading books. In fact, the first thing he seeks when arriving at Takamatsu was the fabled private library, the Komura Memorial Library. And through his conversation with the highly knowledgeable librarian (that he eventually befriended) we get to learn about Murakami’s interpretation of the works of Natsume Soseki, the Tale of Genji, lessons from the Egyptian mythology, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and many more, including lessons from a trial of an ex Nazi officer, and of course the worldview of Franz Kafka that becomes the existentialist basis of this book.
Through all of this, the book shows the ability to dive deep into complicated topics without losing the easy-to-read narrative of the main story, where the breezy narrative is strong enough to withstand even several plot twists, which is a signature style of Murakami’s.
Hence, if this is a movie, this would probably be a Tim Burton movie, with all the out-of-the-world imaginations and symbolisms that don’t always make sense. It has everything, from a gripping beginning, to a sophisticated middle, and with bizarre twists at the last few chapters; all of which shows that “Kafka on the Shore” is one big modern-day Greek tragedy, as clearly explained by Oshima. It’s messy, it’s grotesque, it’s hella confusing at times with several things never explained, and with unexpected violence and taboo-breaking acts that will make your heart pound and your mind goes WTF?!
Brilliant, just brilliant!
THE CHAOS THEORY 