Some books are like people. The more you get to know them the more you like your cat.
This April, during the lock-down, my love affair with the title of Haruki Murakami’s 2002 novel, ‘Kafka on the Shore’ reached a tragic milestone. As far as titles go, I had listed ‘Kafka on the Shore’ among the top titles I have ever seen on the cover of a book. In my eyes, it had all that a title should ever possess; it was attractive and tantalizing in exactly the right amounts. In short, ‘Kafka on the shore’ felt like an equivalent in the book world of a young Daniel Day Lewis in a Steven Scorsese movie.
 Haruki Murakami |
The images the title conjured in my mind stretched all the way back to Shakespeare and evoked lines of Neruda’s ‘Blue Shore of Silence.’ I dreamed of meeting Franz Kafka on every page and tried to figure out what he would be doing on a beach. Perhaps he was waiting for someone, or watching a storm, a shipwreck, or daydreaming. And knowing Murakami, perhaps Kafka would meet Caliban and Prospero on that beach in Japan.
Then, one sunny day in April, like Willy Loman, I fell. I can’t remember now on which page of the copy of Murakami’s book that a friend so generously let me borrow even before he had read it himself, that I realized, ‘Kafka on the Shore’ had nothing to do with the dark haired, brooding novelist of the early twentieth century. It took me almost two days to recover from the shock of knowing Kafka is, in truth, Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old Japanese boy inflicted with the Oedipus myth. Also ‘Kafka on the Shore’ is the fictional title of a song.
Yet, even in the glare of blinding disillusionment I confess I found the book an interesting read, not as someone who enjoyed the storyline but as one translator reading the work of another translator. I realized Philip Gabriel ‘Americanized’ the translated text, no doubt with the intention of bringing readers closer to the story, while at the same time distracting those of us who were trying to guess what the Japanese equivalent might be for exclamations like ‘”Jeez Louise!” Though there is no way of proving it is exactly how the original author intended it to be, Gabriel clearly succeeds in giving two different voices to the two protagonists, Kafka and Nakata as he guides the reader through the maze Murakami creates.
Of the two threads in the plot I like the first, which dealt with the plight of Kafka Tamura who runs away from Tokyo and his father to kill time in a private library in a tiny island in Shikoku called Takamatsu. It is in the library that Kafka meets the librarian, Oshima, and its owner, Mrs Saeki, whose fifteen year-old-self will soon appear in the form of a ghost.
It was the second thread that baffled me and made me wish I could rewrite the whole story myself eliminating the passages about the arrival of a UFO in the Shikoku mountains during the Second World War that leaves a group of school children unconscious for several hours. They all recover, except for one boy, Nakata, who remains in a coma for some weeks before waking up, as he says, “not very bright”, but with the power to talk to cats.
If you have not read the book yet, and if you are irritated with me for giving the story away, forgive me. But, in truth, there’s really no story to give away. By the time you reach the last sentence on page 615 you would still not have tied up any of the many loose ends that dangle from almost every chapter and thankfully not because you and I are dim-witted but because Murakami wanted it that way.
And so, the UFO is never explained. There’s no way of knowing if Mrs Saeki is Kafka’s mother (The answer, given to Kafka, is “you know the answer”.) Is Sakura, the girl Kafka meets at the beginning of the story, really his sister? And who is the Boy Named Crow? Is he Kafka’s friend or his superego or a version of his older self? And why is there a giant evil slug crawling across a Takamatsu apartment, and why do so many fish rain from the sky?
After four months of trying to find the answers, a few weeks ago while roaming through on-line literary magazines I realized there are really no answers. Because,(once again), Murakami wanted it that way. As he explains to Deborah Trisman in the New Yorker, he is not aware of the unreal elements in his books because they all seem real. “If there is a door and you can open it and enter that other place, you do it. It’s just curiosity. What’s inside? What’s over there? So that’s what I do every day. When I’m writing a novel, I wake up around four in the morning and go to my desk and start working. That happens in a realistic world. I drink real coffee. But, once I start writing, I go somewhere else. I open the door, enter that place, and see what’s happening there. I don’t know—or I don’t care—if it’s a realistic world or an unrealistic one. I go deeper and deeper, as I concentrate on writing, into a kind of underground. While I’m there, I encounter strange things. But while I’m seeing them, to my eyes, they look natural.”
If this is unnerving, there’s comfort in the familiar. For ‘Kafka on the Shore’ has all the familiar elements of other Murakami novels. Semi-orphaned teenagers; protagonists on quests for lost women; paranormal experiences; violence; references to jazz and classical music.
Plus the cats. A Murakami novel is an oasis for cat-lovers. Reading about the impressive cat Mimi, and Kafka’s habit of petting every cat he sees, one would think Murakami himself has many cats at home. But when the New Yorker asked him how many cats he has, he had this to say. “None at all. I go jogging around my house every morning and I regularly see three or four cats—they are friends of mine. I stop and say hello to them and they come to me; we know each other very well.”
In the light of all the strange things that happen in his books this disillusionment too, comes as no surprise.
But ‘Kafka on the Shore’ even with all the warts exposed, continues to hold a significant place in my heart. Such are the illogical ways of love.
