Kafka on the Shore
Oct 10th, 2007 by TooHotty
Wow, guys. Wow. Hi! It’s me. How’ve you been? Glad to hear it.
Kafka on the Shore / Haruki Murakami
Vintage International, 2005 - 1-4000-7927-6 (paperback)
Where does one start with Kafka on the Shore? I suppose a plot synopsis is in order, not that it’s possible to get a concept of this book through a plot outline. I hate doing these, so I won’t. Sarah Chung’s brief LA Weekly review is a serviceable primer to the novel.
This is a book that I’m terrified to write about. I was reading it for a book group meeting, and I ended up chickening out and not showing up because I didn’t know how to interpret it, and I was scared everybody would think I was stupid. They’re reading Philip Roth for the next one, so we’ll see how that goes.
I take minor solace in the fact that between about 8 reviews I read online (just now), I found 8 different contradicting interpretations but also got the impression that they were all copying ideas from each other because they were just as lost as I was. Plot synopses across the board contained direct cut and pastes from other synopses. And seriously, this is a 500-page book. There’s no reason multiple people should be quoting the same unspectacular lines.
So, although I was unable to glean (read: steal) any specific insight from those other reviews, I have managed to built up a bit of confidence due to the collective bewilderment of Kafka’s readers.
Some people claim this novel to be overtly American. Others say it is quintessential Japanese. Some label Kafka as a typical Murakami character, and others call him a total deviance. Various interpretations float around like an amorphous cloud, and it occurs to me that that’s how I felt the entire time reading it, and that’s why I love it so much. I could go on and on pulling images and metaphors from the book and telling you why I liked which characters and what certain scenes meant to me, but that would take pages and would likely not inform your personal reading of the novel.
The truth is, Kafka on the Shore is a novel that is impossible to pin down if you think on it too hard. I believe the key to understanding it is to just let it exist in your head. Some of our most sacred emotions are those that would be destroyed by expressing them with words, and this novel calls those out. Reading it took me a long time because each chapter elicited a different state of mind that I could sit in and let my subconscious explore. Incidentally, reading in bed at night was generally not an option as I found myself having some of the strangest, most psychologically frightening dreams of my life under the influence of Murakami’s work.
I want to very seriously endorse this novel, but only if you’re able to seriously suspend your disbelief and if you don’t feel the need to nitpick and understand every last metaphor you come across. This book is like a psychotic drug. Murakami is the William S. Burroughs for the silently introspective…. and the sober.
Further reading:
- “Subconscious Tunnels” - John Updike’s New Yorker Review
- Haruki Murakami Resources - with links to many reviews