Read it in: around a week and a half, I think
I quite like Murakami, and not just because he’s Japanese and because his work is set there, but also because his stories are always strange, but strangely poetic in a sense. When you pick up a Murakami, you’re guaranteed an interesting read, that’s for sure.
This book is no exception. There are fish falling from the sky and ghost girls and hordes of school children fainting all at once. No stranger than the two moons in the sky of 1Q84, I suppose.
The novel is about Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home and stays in a small town on the island of Shikoku. At the same time, the story focuses on an old man named Nakata, who is a finder of lost cats. Both Nakata and Kafka, though they are completely separated, become implicated in a murder and must alter their lives around this. Kafka, in particular, must go into hiding to escape the police. Nakata also embarks on his own journey and both of these characters end up in Shikoku.
What strikes me about this novel – and about most of Murakami’s novels – is that they contain this sense of isolation in the characters. Japan is a place with many, many people, yet I feel that a lot of Japanese literature contains themes of loneliness and isolation from society. (Actually, this seems to be a common theme in all the books that I read… this probably says something about my reading tastes.)
Reading Murakami, in particular, this work of his, you find yourself asking a lot of questions about the meaning of certain events. I have a feeling that an English literature tutor I once had could run a whole course, if not several, on works like this, and still have more to talk about. In fact, ‘Kafka on the Shore’ triggered over 8,000 questions from Murakami’s readers to his website (and he personally answered 1,200 of them – what a champ!). He said this about ‘Kafka’:
Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren’t any solutions provided. Instead several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It’s hard to explain, but that’s the kind of novel I set out to write.
(From the Random House website)
Reading ‘Kafka’ is like entering a dream world, where nothing really makes sense in the way you think it does. Strangely enough (that’s sarcastic, by the way), it reminds me of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’. As you can probably guess, Murakami is a great fan of Kafka’s work, and you can see some of the influence creeping in here. The rules are not the same to what we know. It’s like there’s some strange, spiritual world beyond our own that you don’t know about until it creeps into your life, as it does for the characters in ‘Kafka’.
Well worth a read.
Read it if you: haven’t read any Murakami before, it’d be a nice start, like things set in Japan, think isolated characters are interesting, are willing to suspend your disbelief
While reading, listen to: Fourtet Unspoken, Fourtet And They All Look Broken Hearted
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