A weird, intense, surreal, bewitching world that makes you turn the pages and forces you to decipher the meaning in vain. But still, you feel carried away in a dream like state inside the world of Murakami and feel good at the end for some unknown mysterious reasons.
Two stories interweave.
A boy runs away from his home, at the age of 15, to avoid his father's Oedipal prophecy. He changes his identity to Kafka Tamura; communicates with a boy named crow in times too many; and is determined to find his mother and sister, who left him when he was a child. On the way, he meets Sakura. In his childish fantasies, he considers her to be his lost sister. After many adventures and struggles in the city of Takamatsu, he finds home away from home in Komura Memorial Library. He befriends Oshima (cross gender librarian of that private library with unique music affinity), who helps him in many snafu. He gets attracted to the beautiful but austere Miss Saeki, the head of the library. He imagines that she visits his room at night as a ghost of her 15 year old self. He also spends time in Oshima's cabin far away from the city and explores the forest by himself and finds a surreal world - where he meets the lost, but unaged war veterans and the 15 year old Miss Saeki. Later she cajoles him to return to the real world before it's too late.
An old man, Satoru Nakata lose his memories and intelligence in a suspicious freak accident during World war II. He cannot read but strangly enough can communicate with cats. He lives a simple lonely life in Nogata and earns a bit of extra money by finding missing cats of his neighbours. But his life is changed when he meets Johnnie Walker/ Kafka's father (?) during his hunt of a missing feline, Goma. In this strange world, Johnnie is a peculiar fellow, who kills cat to collect their soul and convert it into a giant flute. He coaxes Nakata to kill him, if Nakata wants to save Goma. Nakata in his utter confusion kills him and surrenders himself to the police. No one believes him, so instead he follows his instinct and decides to leave Tokyo and hitchhike westwards. In his journey he meets Hoshino,a truckdriver, who at first helps Nakata because he reminds Hoshino of his grandfather but slowly he becomes impressed with Nakata and his simplicity and sticks by him to the very end.
The two major characters never meet. But the story is intertwined in an eerie way. They meet in Kafka's blackouts - Kafka wakes up, lost in the city with bloody T-shirt miles away from his father's murder where as Nakata wakes up fresh with the missing felines and clean clothing; in a metaphorical way. The raining fishes and leeches; musical references; repeated diving to surreal world of dreams and ghosts makes the book an unstoppable read.
There is no closure in this book. As my first read 'After Dark', Kafka on the shore ends with too many bubbling questions and a yearning to know more.
- How did Nakata lost his intelligence? (The strange U.F.O incident during World war II is left unexplained)
- Is Sakura really his sister?
- The strange characters Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders dissaparate as if by magic; no explanations on those characters.
- The entrance stone to the strange world, the illuminated pale object struggling to enter the world is not explained. Was that pale object his father's soul who was trying to flee to the surreal world with his flute making skills but stopped by the crow boy in the dream world and Hoshino in the real world?
- Was Miss Saeki his mother? And how come they have got his portrait in the library wall?
- What was the connection between Nakata and Miss Saeki?
Kafka's world is a strange one with little logic or practicality. And although you are brimmed with questions, you yield to Murakami's resolution of not explaining every little thing in his creation.
You will either love this book or hate it. But in my case I turned out to be a big fan. So indulged in Kafka's world that it is going to take some time for me to start up another Murakami. I want to savour this to a very long time. This book has also opened my way to a different genre of music. Although I am more of a rock music and an occasional listener of Beethoven and Mozart kind, now I am addicted to Schubert's D major piano performances specially Allegro moderato.
Listen it here! https://youtu.be/YlUj9J4Bjz8
My favorite quotes:
- I want you to remember me. If you remember me, then I don't care if everybody else forgets.
- Man doesn't choose fate. Fate chooses man. That's the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy- according to Aristotle- comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist weak points but from his good qualities. do you know what i am getting at? People are drawn into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.
- There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
- "When a war starts people are forced to become soldiers. They carry guns and go to the front lines and have to kill soldiers on the other side. As many as they possibly can. No body cares whether you like killing other people or not. It's just something you have to do. Otherwise you're the one who gets killed." Johnnie Walker pointed his index finger at Nakata's chest. "Bang!" he said. "Human history in a nutshell."
- Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars.
- Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive.
- Chance encounters are what keeps us going.
- It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.
- When I open them most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers, breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.
- Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves.
- Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart.
- If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.
- Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.
- Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones.
- Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.
- Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.
- A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.
Happy reading.
