SansPoint

Kafka on the Shore is, top to bottom, 100% pure, distilled Murakami. It hits all the right notes, all the usual requirements, and checks off everything on the standard Murakami checklist.I’ve harped on before about Murakami’s writing^[1] Reading Kafka, however, felt a great deal like rediscovering Murakami once again. Even on a first reading, something about the novel feels like slipping on an old, well-worn t-shirt or sweater. Even in the midst of the surreality and the confusion there is comfort. Reading Murakami is a bit like exploring the dark side of the moon, while being lead by the person you trust the most. “Just follow me,” they might say, and you do. There’s no reason not to, and as long as you do, you will be perfectly safe, no matter how harrowing it may get.

Approaching Kafka after having read After Dark provides an interesting perspective into some of the perceptual twists that Murakami uses in Kafka. There are several moments in the narrative when point-of-view is shifted to great effect. Most of these come through the “Boy named Crow”, but one major one occurs without warning and made nearly drop the book from shock. The brief point-of-view experiments foreshadow Murakami’s full-bore shift in After Dark, as if Murakami used Kafka as a staging area. Certainly, the brief foray into second-person narration for a brief moment proved to be, at least, good practice for the perspective of After Dark. For all its novelty, however, Kafka bears more in common with an earlier work of fiction, his fourth novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - even beyond the symbol of the shadow.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland, much like Kafka blends two, seemingly unrelated narratives, each taking up alternate chapters. The connection between the two narratives is initially hard to determine in both novels, and as each parallel story follows its path, Murakami skillfully weaves them together in a way that seems purely natural and seamless.^[2] Hard-Boiled Wonderland is less subtle in its introduction of the surreal—right in the first chapter we are given the sensation of more of a science-fiction, Blade Runneresque style work, which stands in a pretty stark contrast to the fantasy-novel style narrative in the second narrative. There is a methodology, however, to the earlier novel’s approach that shows Murakami still finding his feet in the surreal. Kafka’s melding of stories is clearly the work of a much more experienced author.

Another stylistic similarity comes in point-of-view in the parallel narratives. Hard-Boiled Wonderland established its varience through the first narrative being in past tense, and the second narrative in present tense.^[3] Kafka alternates between first-person limited point-of-view and third-person omniscient to tell the stories of Kafka Tamura and Mr. Satoru Nakata. It is difficult to go into the details of both narratives in either novel without plot spoilers. Suffice it to say, that the one major difference between Kafka’s use of parallel narrative and Hard-Boiled Wonderland is that each narrative in Kafka deals with two totally separate characters, and the way the two stories link will make you very confused and intregued indeed.

What the parallel narratives do in Kafka and in Hard-Boiled Wonderland is give the reader a puzzle. The challenge, and the pleasure comes from not simply riding the story out, but in predicting where it will go. There is a much slower and much clearer reveal of the solution in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, but Kafka will have you scratching your head for days to come. There is little fiction, I suspect, quite like it. As always, any Murakami comes highly recommended. His fiction is one of the most aggressively unique and powerful as anyone’s today. Kafka is only one example of many of an author ready to challenge the reader, and himself.

1. Among the Murakami-related posts are this one about Murakami’s first novel, compared to his newer works, a bit of praise for the short story “TV People”, and a review of the novel After Dark. ↩
2. This, particularly in Kafka is dependent on the readers ability/willingness to go with Murakami’s stylistic and thematic quirks. It is a testament to the carefully metered way in which the surreal is mixed with the normal in Murakami’s fiction that you can simply accept the appearance of Johnnie Walker (the character from the whisky bottle), and his role in the story. That’s not the weirdest bit, either, and neither is the appearance of Colonel Sanders. ↩
3. The original Japanese version of the novel provided what may be a better trick, but one that is unreproducable in English. The first narrative used the first-person singular subjective pronoun watashi while the second used the more personal pronoun boku. Since there’s only one first-person singular subjective pronoun in English, an attempt to reproduce this in a more authentic fashion would go over like a lead balloon filed with uranium. ↩