Review of ​Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

​Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami is a novel about a fifteen-year-old boy, Kafka Tamura, who has become fed up with his life and his father in Tokyo, so he runs away. While he doesn’t know where he plans on ending up, along the way he meets a girl, Sakura, on the bus. One night, when he comes to and finds blood on his shirt, he calls up Sakura to ask for help in trying to figure out what happened. Eventually, Kafka finds a library in Takamatsu where he meets the assistant, Oshima, and the main librarian, Miss Saeki. Because Kafka is worried that he killed someone, he tries to lay low at the library. Miss Saeki is an elusive woman who had lost the love of her life when she was younger and was stuck in time, while it’s later revealed that Oshima is trans. Kafka stays at the library, going back and forth from his hotel until Oshima offers a room in the library for him. As the room is getting prepared, Oshima takes Kafka to his family’s old cabin with a forest that two soldiers had once gotten lost in. Then, when Kafka assists Oshima in his library duties and sleeps, on some nights a ghost of a young Miss Saeki sits in the room gazing at a painting. Miss Saeki had once been a singer, producing only one song, from the time her love went off to university, soon to be killed. She had disappeared for some time, which was when Kafka believe that her and his father had him before she ran away with his sister. Eventually, Kafka has sex with both the young Miss Saeki and the older Miss Saeki, falling in love with her. When Kafka learns that the police are after him due to his father’s death, Oshima sends him back to the cabin. At the cabin, Kafka decides to walk into the forest so far that he meets the soldiers that were lost. It turns out they were guarding an entrance to a town that seemed to be in the spiritual world. Upon arriving in the town, Kafka meets both Miss Saeki’s, with the older one telling him he needed to leave before the entrance closed. So with a torn heart, Kafka leaves and returns to the library, a new man, and decides to return back home. The whole time Kafka remembers what his father had said to him, how he would kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister. All of which seemed to come true.
 
In addition to Kafka, a second storyline emerges with an older man, Mr. Nakata, who has both lost his memory and is mentally challenged. This was due to an event when he was a child where he fell unconscious for three weeks on top of a hill during a school field trip picking mushrooms. After he woke up, Mr. Nagata was different and could never achieve the goals that his family set out for him. Though, the one thing he could do was talk to cats, which he uses to look for a missing cat called Goma. Along the way Mr. Nakata meets other cats who tell him that Goma may have been kidnapped. It’s only when a dog leads Mr. Nagata to a man called Johnnie Walker where he learns that the cats are being killed and their hearts eaten to create a flute that controls living beings. Johnnie Walker goads Mr. Nakata to kill him, though Mr. Nakata is unwilling until one of the friendly cats is about to be killed. Mr. Nakata then stabs the man with a knife, saving Goma and the other cats. However, it turns out that Johnnie Walker is Kafka’s father, which means that Mr. Nakata must leave Tokyo to evade. And while he did tell the police, they didn’t believe him. Along the way out of Tokyo, Mr. Nakata makes fish and leeches fall out of the sky, eventually meeting up with a trucker named Hoshino. They get along well and while Mr. Nakata doesn’t know where he’s supposed to go, they drive to Takamatsu where Mr. Nakata realizes he must find the entrance stone. They take a few days to look for it, and not until a concept called Colonel Sanders points Hoshino in the right direction, do they find it and open it. From there, Mr. Nakata continues to search for what he needs to complete, and only finds it at the library where Kafka had stayed. When they talk with Miss Saeki, Mr. Nakata realizes that she’s the one that he needs to talk to. She enlists Mr. Nakata to burn her life’s writing, all her memories, before she passes away. That day, as Mr. Nakata and Hoshino are back at their apartment, Mr. Nakata dies and it’s up to Hoshino to close the entrance. The two days after, a black cat tells Hoshino he must kill it before it can reach the entrance stone or else. Late at night, Hoshino finds out what it is, which is a white mucous thing that climbs out of Mr. Nakata’s dead mouth. Hoshino closes the entrance stone, kills the thing, and eventually makes his return back to his job.
 
Murakami weaves so many fantastical and magical things into the modern world it feels truly surreal. There are characters that take on the faces of brands, talking cats, and ghost sex. The novel also isn’t afraid to break form as in the use of interviews for Mr. Nakata’s unconsciousness, the use of the boy named Crow as Kafka’s inner voice/strength, or when the narrative switches to a second person POV during the intimate moments with Miss Saeki. The taboo nature of the sex between mother and son is explicitly referred to when Kafka reveals the curse his father put on him when talking to Oshima, which made the narrative all the more aware of itself. Because Kafka is initially horror-stricken with this curse and the inevitability of it being played out speaks to the way destiny and fate are referred to in the novel. And while I’m not trans, it felt that the reveal of Oshima only worked to deepen his character rather than him being used as a prop. In part, because Kafka is a boy, the language around women does seem a little misogynistic, though makes sense for his character. And while there weren’t definitive answers to if Kafka and/or Mr. Nakata killed Kafka’s father, why the kids in the forest went unconscious, if Kafka’s father was also Johnnie Walker, or if the town was a spiritual middle world, I felt satisfied with leaving those questions unanswered.
 
Final Rating: 5/5