By Haruki Murakami
Knopf Books, 436 pages
Available at Powerbooks
If life is some kind of waking dream, what kind of dream is it? Ask Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, and he might reply that it’s a dream where fish and leeches rain down from the sky; where Colonel Sanders prowls Takamatsu’s back alleys as a pimp, and Johnnie Walker collects severed cats’ heads in his refrigerator; and where a boy named Kafka Tamura runs away from home to escape an Oedipal curse, only to fall into the arms of a woman who may, or may not, be his mother.
In Kafka on the Shore, Murakami taps once again into the peculiar hazy consciousness that marks all his novels. A good Murakami novel is a lot like entering a dream, or – even better – a vintage David Lynch movie, though Lynch has admitted he receives little actual material from his dreams (the only thing in Blue Velvet that came straight from a dream, he claims, is the image of a man in a yellow suit still standing up, even though he’s clearly dead). In translated novels as varied as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, A Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami lets his narratives drift along their own surreal turns, never standing in the way of a good image or a bizarre twist.
Along the way, he’s staked a claim to being Japan’s most cyber-real writer, mixing technology and psychology, injecting both deadpan humor and the supernatural into his books, and challenging notions of "old" Japan with a "new" Japan that is mostly made up of Western pop references. Now 54, he’s too old to be Gen-X, but literary labels have not stopped him from pursuing a story. Or a disturbingly vivid dream.
Kafka on the Shore follows 15-year-old runaway Kafka Tamura – a boy who’s on the run, he says, from his father’s curse that he will sleep with both his mother and his sister. He randomly settles down in a place called Takamatsu, lands a job in a library that is run by Miss Saeki – a ghostly older woman who once wrote a haunting, million-selling ballad called "Kafka on the Shore."
Kafka’s search for identity is interspersed with another storyline– that of Nakata, an endearing senior citizen who talks to cats, among other odd talents. We first meet Nakata through news reports of a strange incident during World War II: a group of schoolchildren who were picking mushrooms on a hillside of an unnamed Japanese town suddenly fell unconscious.
When they came to, all – except one – were completely unharmed and unchanged. Nakata, we learn, is the one child whose memories were wiped out by the incident – was it experimental gas used by the military or some other toxin? We never find out, but what persists is the eerie image of children scattered on a hillside, lying unconscious in a mushroom patch.
Nakata loses his memory and quite a few brain cells, but picks up the skill of communicating with felines, which he uses to aid owners of lost cats. His detective work intertwines with Kafka’s, and their worlds inevitably collide. In one of the book’s more disturbing scenes, Nakata hunts down a missing cat, only to find the perpetrator is named Johnnie Walker – complete with top hat, coattails and nearby glass of whisky.
"I’ve got five cats inside this case, all from the vacant lot. A fresh batch. Just picked, fresh from the grove, so to speak. I’ve given them all injections to paralyze them. It’s not an anesthetic – they’re not asleep and they can feel pain, but they can’t move their arms or legs. Or even their heads. I do this to keep them from thrashing about. What I’m going to do is slice open their chests with a knife, extract their still-beating hearts, and cut their heads off. Right in front of your eyes. There’ll be lots of blood, and unimaginable pain. Imagine how much it’d hurt if somebody cut open your chest and pulled out your heart! Same thing holds true for cats – it’s got to hurt. I feel sorry for the poor little things. I’m not some cold, cruel sadist, but there’s nothing I can do about it. There has to be pain. That’s the rule."
This is a flat-out creepy depiction of evil, whether you’re a cat person or not.
Leave it to Murakami to make even the cheery symbols of Western capitalism – the Johnnie Walker man, the goateed Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame – seem bizarre and sinister. As a writer, he has never kept secret his own creature comforts. He does enjoy Johnnie Walker whiskey, just as he enjoys classical and pop music, cooking spaghetti and ironing (proclivities shared by various fictional characters of his in previous books). He also writes freely about sex (and sexual obsession is one of the themes here), making him popular with younger readers.
Some may complain that Murakami is rehashing old themes here: the mysterious older woman, Miss Saeki, is similar in ways to the older woman in his previous Sputnik Sweetheart, for example. But as far as Japanese bizarro-world fiction goes, nobody does it better.
Other odd bits and pieces of pop explode around the periphery of Kafka on the Shore: "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" plays in one scene, a harbinger of the psychedelic patina to Murakami’s work. John Coltrane’s "My Favorite Things" punctuates another scene. A character sits through a double feature of early Truffaut films. We’re never exactly sure what is real and what is imagined in Kafka on the Shore. Perhaps this quote from philosopher Henri Bergson spoken by one character begins to explain how the author regards reality: "The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory."
As Kafka and Nakata come closer to some supernatural cataclysm by the end of the book, we feel like we’ve slipped into one of Lynch’s "alternate universe" boxes, like the one in Mulholland Drive. Murakami’s novels are likely to veer off into Lynchian territory, or at least take on the cosmic irony of Kurt Vonnegut and the obsessive tone of Alfred Hitchcock. The author is clearly capable of dwelling in the real world – as his previous accounts of the sarin gas attack in Tokyo and the 1995 earthquake in Kobe will attest. But imagination, and its irresistible undercurrents, are what make him a compelling writer. If you try too hard to figure out what Kafka on the Shore is all about, you’ll become as lost as Nakata, trying to decipher the language of cats and ancient rocks.
Maybe another proverb in the book, this one Chinese, explains how best to approach his novels: "Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all."