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Kafka on the Shore
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Kafka on the Shore
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More reviews by Peter Gordon
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Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Marukami
HARUKI MARUKAMI latest novel KAFKA ON THE SHORE is indescribable, literally and metaphorically. The novel has large doses of the supernatural and metaphysical as well as distinct and deliberate echoes of and references to many works of Western literature, and touches on reincarnation, Oedipus, and the magic of dreams, music and art and the nature of reality.
Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen and finds another home in a small private library. Meanwhile, his father is murdered -- at the first part of the fulfillment of an Oedipal prophesy. A parallel and intersecting plot involves a simpleton who can speak to cats and is involved in such supernatural events as fish raining from the sky.
Kafka meets a sphinx-like woman who is -- probably -- his mother, while he is -- probably -- the reincarnation of the woman's teenage love. Meanwhile, reality is found in dreams, and the world is out of kilter because an entrance to another world (with possible references to Orpheus and Eurydice) has been left open. And, yes, it's all very Oedipal.
This sounds almost like science-fiction -- and, indeed, I felt echoes of Heinlein as well -- and even perhaps rather bad teenage science-fiction ... but KAFKA ON THE SHORE isn't that at all. I don't know how Murakami pulls this off, but he does: as amazing as it sounds, he makes this world - these worlds -- believable and natural, and one gets sucked into the characters and plot as it ambles along. It is something of a feat for such a peculiar and slow-moving book to be un-put-downable.
Casting the main character as a precocious fifteen year-old was a masterstroke, for that is a magical age, when we are old enough to have sophisticated, worldly dreams, yet still be innocent enough to think that believing hard enough is all that is needed -- needed to understand our dreams, or find them, or realise them. It is an age when the subconscious and the 'real world' still seem as if they might merge.
Dreams, music, painting, poetry, words move Tamura to his soul, and through him, us.
I thought this was a marvelous book. Indescribable.
Peter Gordon
19/12/2004
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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