Kafka on the Shore

Kafka Tamura is a fifteen-year-old boy who has run away from his Tokyo home to flee his emotionally abusive father. Having been abandoned by his mother and older sister when he was a small boy, Kafka sets off on an ill-defined and poorly planned quest to recapture the family life he never really had and to escape the modified Oedipal curse his father has placed on him (i.e., Kafka is destined to kill his father and sleep with both his mother and his sister). Satoru Nakata is an elderly man also in search of something he does not fully understand. After an unexplained illness suffered in childhood leaves him intellectually impaired and with no memories—but with the ability to speak to cats—Nakata has spent his life as a ward of the show more state, but now senses that he is destined for another purpose. After a violent event causes him to leave Tokyo as well, Nakata’s journey takes him to the same town in the south of Japan where Kafka is now hiding from the law. How—and why—will the paths of these two men intersect?

In Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami has created this inventive coming-of-age tale, which is at once intellectually challenging and fully engaging at every turn of its serpentine plot. The main challenge for the reader is that the story is told in a magical realism style where myriad bizarre things occur: memories and dreams become real, fish rain down from the sky, evil spirits take the form of famous corporate symbols (e.g., Johnnie Walker, Colonel Sanders), soldiers from World War II wander a lost forest for sixty years without aging, ghosts of still-living characters appear randomly. However, this all makes sense in the end as the major conflicts are resolved in an emotionally fulfilling manner. The narrative is greatly enhanced by an interesting stylistic choice in which the main characters’ stories are developed in alternating chapters—Kafka’s written in the first-person present, Nakata’s in the third-person past—which allows them to eventually converge smoothly from very different starting points and perspectives.

I really enjoyed reading this novel, as I have everything I have come across from this remarkable author. Murakami is an imaginative and truly gifted storyteller and the facile way in which he integrates such fantastical elements into the mix is quite impressive. Magical realism is a difficult style to pull off convincingly but, like other modern masters of that tricky genre (e.g., Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie), he does so here skillfully. I also admire the clear love and compassion that Murakami has for his characters, who are fully realized creations that the reader comes to care about quite a lot. Impressively, that care is evident not only in how the main characters were created, but in the development of the impressive and memorable supporting cast as well, including Miss Saeki, Oshima, Sakura, Hoshino, and a host of cats, all of whom play pivotal roles in how the narrative unfolds. This was a captivating and extremely satisfying book to read and the story is not one that I will soon forget. show less

This is an amazing work of magical realism. Peppered with profound passages, deftly weaving humor, irony, and musings on the universalities of the human experience, it is the story of two people, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura and the elderly and illiterate Nakata, whose paths are inextricably drawn toward one another.... Talking cats, raining fish, Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders --- literary devices that *sound* just downright silly --- are used by the brilliant Murakami to move the story along and provoke the reader to suspend disbelief and *recognize* the role that metaphor, dreams, and fantasy play in any work of literature (not to mention philosophical musings about the meaning of time, memory, and life in general). Murakami's novel show more comments upon itself as it tells its story. Kafka and Nakata are both lovable characters and they are surrounded by intriguing lovable characters, but none of that is the point. What is the point? It would be hard for any one reader to say.... It's one of the most satisfyingly complex novels I have ever read and I'm keeping my copy for a future reread. show less

Tl;dr achava que Murakami seria um autor divertido mas meio medíocre, mas me surpreendi com um livro tecnicamente interessante mas extremamente tedioso de se ler.

Assim, creio que racionalmente fui capaz de compreender as metáforas, mas elas não me disseram nada. Tento conceder a Murakami certo crédito acreditando que a injustificabilidade de muita coisa nesse livro advém de eu não ser japonês, e, portanto, não pegar de maneira intuitiva certas ideias e sensações que ele utiliza — mas, dito isso, ainda acredito que um livro melhor executado teria passado por cima desse problema. Mas Murakami é sucesso de vendas fora do Japão, então tudo isso que eu disse parece perder a necessidade. Eu genuinamente não vi, ao menos nesse show more livro, apelo algum. É só porque ele é uwu? Eu gostaria de acreditar que não.

Dito isso, entra o meu segundo, e, francamente, maior problema com o livro, de longe: há uma certa verborragia no Murakami que não me agradou. As palavras parecem ter emergido sem muita atenção da mesma forma que os acontecimentos na narrativa — mas, enquanto eu sou perfeitamente capaz de aceitar incoerência intencional no enredo, um texto descuidado está além de minha disposição, ainda mais para um livro de mais de 500 páginas. — Mas, aí, de novo dando o benefício da dúvida ao Murakami, entra um problema agora objetivamente sério: a tradução (brasileira) da Alfaguara é bem ruim e isso, admito, contribuiu bastante para a minha má vontade para com o livro.

Erros de formatação são poucos e irrelevantes. Também não notei erro gramatical nenhum, mas não procurei. Não: o problema era mais estranho: escolha de palavras. Alguns exemplos me vem à mente agora:
- dizer "ficou de cavalinho"em vez de "ficou de quatro".
- "ter firme preconceito" em vez de "ter firme decisão" ou "motivação"
- o mais incompreensível deles: "eu cheguei" em vez de ejaculei ou o coloquial gozei. Tentei entender de onde esse pudera vir e a única conclusão que cheguei é que é uma tradução bizarra da conjugação errada do verbo inglês "to cum" ("I came"(??????)). Mas achava que essa era uma tradução direta, então de onde isso?... Sei lá, não sei japonês.
Esses erros, mais estilísticos do que formais, são extremamente frequentes, ao ponto de atrapalhar a leitura. Concedem uma certa artificialidade ao texto que, julgo, o afasta do original.

No final das contas, Kafka à beira-mar não é um livro ruim. Teoricamente, gostei dele e de várias coisas que ele se propõe a fazer. A execução, contudo, deixou bastante a desejar, e li mais por querer concluir do que pelo prazer da leitura. Genuinamente, não consegui entender o que faz desse autor um dos mais badalados do mundo.

Botei na minha fila ler mais algum livro dele, mas mais para garantir que não estou tomando um ponto como a média do que por estar com vontade. Está tão no fundo dela, contudo, que talvez eu nunca chegue a lê-lo, de tantos outros que vão acabar furando a fila. show less

The majority of my experience reading this spectacular and surreal novel was exceptional. I haven’t been as thoroughly absorbed by a fictional world in a long time. Specifically, reading the first half was mesmerizing. The writing is simple, compelling, and multi-layered. The text so often naturally but unobtrusively functions on a literal and symbolic level.

Like his Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, I was less than thrilled by the way Murakami “landed” the dual narrative. It’s not that I wanted more explained; in fact, i may have wanted less. When people, narratives, and conflicts are mysteriously intertwined and the intertwining is done so well—and it’s done unbelievably well in this novel—it’s usually a show more let-down when the connections are explained. Additionally, the very end, while satisfying on certain levels, didn’t feel “resolution-y” enough to me.

Regardless of my criticisms, I loved this novel. I liked it more than Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which I really liked. It solidified my plan to continue reading Murakami in the near future. show less

This is such a captivating story of a 15-year-old boy going by the alias Kafka (Crow) Tamura who runs away from his father’s house. There are two parallel stories, and the hope is to see where and how they will intersect. I love the part when Mr. Nakata talks to cats. I wonder why the author has another lost cat in his book again. I know this is the Japanese version of Oedipus Rex, but I didn’t like the parts where Kafka thought he was having sex with his mother and sister. I love the cameos of Johnny Walker (Red) and Colonel Sanders in this book. I reminds me of when cartoonist Steve Pastis borrows characters from other comic strips to put in his “Pearls Before Swine”. There is so much symbolism in Kafka on the Shore that show more it’s hard to read this story without being drawn into trying to interpret it. It’s a beautiful read if one just flows with the story and lets the emotional part of it grab you. show less

Kafka Tamura runs away from his home in Tokyo, travelling almost randomly to a far-away city. There he spends most of his time in a special library, absorbed in his reading. After a little more than a week he wakes up in a park next to a shrine covered in blood that is not his own. Nakata is an old man who tracks down lost cats. His current job takes him to an abandoned building site where he sits and waits until a dog arrives and tells him to follow it. Such are the two disparate narratives in Kafka On The Shore, a strange, eerie, disturbing novel filled with the magical and the surreal, with diversions into the realms of art, music, and philosophy and an intricate, opaque metaphysical plot propelling the actions of the protagonists, show more while they try to makes some sense out of the odd, dangerous turns their lives have taken

It's certainly a superb novel. Murakami occupies a sort of calm, literary kingdom that starts at the point where Neil Gaiman, Flann O'Brien and Jonathan Carroll intersect. Very little of the underlying plot is explained, but, thematically, it all makes a dramaturgical logic, making sense as a narrative, with only sly hints at any underlying explanation. His characters, though, are alive, and richly developed and emotionally real, even in the most bizarre and shocking of circumstances. Mr Nakata, who can neither read nor write but can talk to cats, is a particularly engaging character in his simplicity and his innocence, both of which mask a tragedy of a lost life.

There's some very strange sex (the sex itself isn't strange, it's either who's having it or what's said during it), an aesthetic and spiritual awakening, a savage murder and weird things fall from the sky. And it all makes sense. It just doesn't get explained. How did he DO that? show less

Haruki Murakami is Japan’s fiercely imaginative novelist of memory. Memory is dramatically apposite right now, as Japan and China duke it out over Japan’s role (and seeming lapse of memory) in brutalizing China during World War II and before. In Murakami’s previous novel, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the theme of atrocities committed during war time is explicit: by means of an inexplicable (or anyway unexplained) time warp, the late-twentieth-century protagonist of the novel finds himself taking responsibility for forgotten crimes during the war. In Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World the two plots of the novel are conjoined in the memory of a shadowy narrator living in a cyberpunkish Tokyo. In Murakami’s debut in show more English, A Wild Sheep Chase, it is a photograph that is the repository of the unnamed narrator’s memory of a Blow Up-like mystery. Murakami is a sumptuous and generous writer who explores deeply moral terrain without pointing fingers. Instead, he is a master of the deadpan sideswipe which, a few pages later, leaves us aching with sorrow or joy, depending on the contest, but anyway reading with new eyes.

In Kafka on the Shore the mechanism of responsibility and the means of memory are even more evanescent. We are in the narrative hands of “the world’s toughest 15-year-old,” Kafka Tamura. Kafka has run away from his father, a famous sculptor living in Tokyo, for Takamatsu, far to the south. There he finds a strange library staffed by a hermaphrodite and a reclusive woman, Miss Saeki, who once had a hit pop record but now spends her time in her studio writing—writing and remembering.

Kafka is caught up in a series of strange events: his father is murdered one night, and Kafka wakes up, hundreds of miles away, from a blackout with blood on his shirt. A Mr. Nakata, who can talk with cats (providing some hilarious and delightful dialogue) but who is otherwise, as he says of himself, not very bright, is looking for—something. Nakata doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he’ll know when he finds it. Nakata hitches a ride with a truck driver, and together they find themselves, led by Nakata’s cat-like intuition, in Takamatsu. Nakata is followed by rains of frogs and leeches—and the police. Nakata is suspected of the murder of Kafka’s father, and the police want to talk to all three: Kafka, Nakata and the truck driver.

Surprisingly, mysteriously, and ultimately, satisfyingly, it is not the murder that connects these characters but something much stranger. During the War a little boy (who we implicitly know is the young Nakata) suffers a blackout. Bright and curious before, when he comes to he is dull and unable to care for himself. Why did he blackout on a school outing while scouting for mushrooms? “This is a military secret,” perhaps, but “Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through, is now like something from the distant past.” And maybe, for once, the military isn’t responsible:

It doesn’t matter whose dream it started out as…. You’re responsible for whatever happens in the dream. The dream crept down inside you, right down the dark corridor of your soul.”

Darkness creeps in: Miss Saeki in her solitude—what is she remembering? And why is Kafka so attracted to this much older woman? Who is the young boy standing on the shore in the painting that hangs on the wall of the library? You’ll get no answers from me except to say that this masterful novel is much more than a literary puzzle. It is a sonar pulse sounding the depths of the human soul. “The Earth slowly keeps on turning. But beyond any of those details of the real, there are dreams. And everyone’s living in them.” We’re all living in dreams, some shared, some not. And for that, we are responsible.

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good Book show less