Murakami's Kafka on the Shore: everything in life is metaphor.

Lai, Chen-nan

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore. Trans. Philip Gabriel. New York: Vintage, 2005. 480 pages.

The principal protagonist of Kafka on the Shore is a young man who calls himself Kafka Tamura. On the eve of his fifteenth birthday, he leaves his home and travels alone by overnight bus to Shikoku, the southern island he had long determined to visit. His departure is motivated by a desire to evade this prediction of his father: that someday he would kill his father with his own hands and sleep with his mother--and with his older sister. Kafka's mother had in fact disappeared when he was four years old, abandoning her son but taking with her his sister who was six years his senior. Kafka had never seen a photograph of his mother, and in fact did not even know her name.

On his own now and guided apparently by some imperceptible workings of fate, Kafka reaches Shikoku and comes to a private library, where he takes up residence. The owner is a Miss Saiki, a beauty of character and particular elegance in her early forties whose life has been marked by tumult and mystery. Even though Kafka suspects she may be his mother, at no point does Miss Saiki do anything either to confirm or deny his suspicions. Kafka falls in love with her, and their relationship is physically consummated.

The even-numbered chapters of the novel develop another story line in parallel with Kafka's, featuring an old man named Nakata who had, while a primary-school student during World War II, experienced with classmates a quite incomprehensible collective loss of consciousness, from which he emerged to find he had entirely lost his memory. Not only was he unable to recover any of the knowledge he had acquired, he also could no longer read, or even count. On the other hand, he now had the unusual ability to converse with cats. At one point, Nakata loses control of his faculties and kills a madman who goes by the name Johnny Walker, after which he also makes his circuitous way to Shikoku, where the young Kafka Tamura is living. At this point, the two stories that had been developing in parallel acquire an on-again, off-again relationship that it turns out fate has predestined, and when they do converge, they do so around the person of Miss Saiki. In addition to these major characters just described, others, including Sakura, Oshima, Hoshino, Colonel Sanders, Oshima's big brother Sada and a number of cats to whom Nakata has given names, are assigned roles of metaphorical import in this work.

Kafka on the Shore comprises a total of 49 chapters, although if one adds the interludes entitled "The Boy Named Crow" that appear in Books 1 and 2, they amount to 50. The odd-numbered chapters for the most part use realism, dreamscapes and metaphor to tell the tale of the young Kafka Tamura and his abandonment of the paternal home as he is about to turn fifteen. The even-numbered chapters, meanwhile, in keeping with the erratic parallelism of the separate stories, draw on illusion, surrealism and fatalism to portray the many odd encounters that mark the life of old Mr. Nakata. The alternation of these two approaches endows the work with rich inventiveness, fantastic cunning and interplay of opposites in what amounts to a modern fable and an exploration of irony. Dreams seem to be endowed with metaphorical meaning, as the author uses the dream state to link reality with surrealism, and this world with its opposite. The "spirit projection" nature of the dream state is also used to fill the otherwise impassible chasm between world and underworld (71).

There are two principal spiritual sources discernible for Kafka on the Shore. One is the classical Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex and its allusions to the ironies of fate (210). The other is Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), which provides the "vengeful spirits" of the living who set out to do others harm (71), as well as the ghosts, spirits and other supernatural phenomena informing Murakami's creative technique. In the interplay of these artifacts of ancient Western and Eastern cultures in the deepest strata of consciousness, the young Kafka Tamura becomes the object of a curse just like the ancient Oedipus, and in the dream state, each of the curse-like predictions of his father is fulfilled, one by one. The novel shows an expert hand in mounting deceptions and building suspense; the story abounds in unexpected twists, and the plot develops with terse concentration and an irresistible appeal that drives readers to absorb the whole in a single sitting. Indeed, the reader relishes Murakami's unique logical language, the clear shaping of his characters, and the mystery, modernity and symbolism built into the novel's architecture.

Like the author's earlier work Norwegian Wood (1987), Kafka on the Shore is also the title of a song featured in the book: You sit at the edge of the world I am in a crater that's no more. Words without letters Standing in the shadow of the door. The drowning girl's fingers Search for the entrance stone, and more. Lifting the hem of her azure dress, She gazes-- at Kafka on the shore. (238)

Neither the title of the book, the name of the song, nor indeed the lyrics are particularly difficult to understand, though they are clearly symbolic and even have a certain surrealistic flavor. They are strongly metaphorical in nature. In addition, considering that the noun kafka in Czech means "crow," if this meaning is attached to the young protagonist Kafka Tamura and to the titles of the book and the song, and associated with the interludes entitled "The Boy Named Crow," the whole work can be viewed at all three levels as replete with metaphor. In fact, whether Kafka Tamura can become the "world's toughest 15-year old" in a world in which all is metaphor, or whether he can obtain redemption through his father's curse-like prophecy, is no longer very important. What is important is whether he can draw from the mockeries of fate the wherewithal to invest himself with greater breadth and depth. It is as Oshima says in the book: Sometimes [it's a hopeless situation]. But irony deepens a person, helps them mature. It's the entrance to salvation on a higher plane, to a place where you can find a more universal kind of hope. That's why people enjoy reading Greek tragedies even now, why they're considered prototypical classics. I'm repeating myself, but everything in life is metaphor. People don't usually kill their father and sleep with their mother, right? In other words, we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings. (210)

As Kafka on the Shore reminds us so often that "everything in life is metaphor," we are brought to revisit the bygone flavors of all the fiction that came before Haruki Murakami's, and to experience the complex interweaving effect of all indeed being metaphor. Reading this new novel leads me once again to hear in Murakami the music of the wind, yet grasp of it not a trace.

Translated by Peter V. Smith