Review: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (2002/2005)

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Kodansha, 2002 (JP)/2005 (EN), 656 pp.

Rating: A+

Not since reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road in high school has a single novel managed to so drastically alter my "to-read" pile in one fell swoop. I remember fondly the days of going through just about every novel Kerouac ever wrote one after another over the course of the six months following my first experience with the Beat generation; it was the kind of novel that changed the way I look at literature. Kafka on the Shore has managed to somehow recreate that sensation I had only assumed was a result of being young and impressionable. Murakami proves that books can still affect me that profoundly, as in the seven weeks or so that have passed since reading this, I have read nine of Murkami's books.

Kafka on the Shore is best described as a surrealist bildungsroman. Kafka Tomura is a young boy whose mother ran away with his sister when he is very young. He is sick of his absent artist father, and decides to pack up and hit the road. It doesn't seem that the sole reason of Kafka's adventure is to find his lost family, but any young boy who misses his mother and his sister is going to try to find them everywhere he looks.

What starts as a simple idea for an adventure becomes all the more complex when the secondary storyline starts to unfold in the form of weird reports about an incident in Japan in World War II in which a group of school children suddenly collapsed while collecting flowers. People around the incident are interviewed about the circumstances, including the school teacher who was unaffected by the strange phenomenon. To make things more interesting, another storyline pops up featuring a slightly intellectually disabled old man called Nakata who has the gift of being able to communicate with cats. As an additional source of income from his government benefits, he runs his own business of using his gift to find missing cats.

It all starts out like three separate stories that don't really have much to do with one another, but two stories quickly become one and the two remaining move rapidly towards one another through the course of what is apparently a quite lengthy book. I was really surprised to look up the page count of this, which I read electronically, as I read it over the course of only three days and barely took breaks. It seemed to just fly by for me, as I have not been so engrossed in a novel in years.

The big question of the story revolves around Kafka himself and his family. He meets a young girl called Sakura who he decides must be his sister, despite all the evidence on the contrary. Not long after, he starts to frequent a library where he decides the manager, Miss Saeki, must be his mother. To help him along, he strikes up a friendship with Oshima, the only other employee at the library. Oshima is a great character with a lot of depth and interest, who manages to come across as very real despite being very uncommon.

Although this is the kind of novel that suggests a lot but leaves the reader to decide for him or herself as to what is really going on, I think the brilliance of the book is that it doesn't really matter what the answers are. Some may be frustrated by a long journey that doesn't really have an end, but I think that those people may be missing a key point. It doesn't matter whether or not Sakura or Miss Saeki are actually Kafka's missing family; the point is that a young boy who misses his family will always try to find his family everywhere he is. No matter who he had met on his travels, they would have been the family in his head if they even vaguely resembled the age of his lost loved ones. It's about a young boy who balances a childlike optimism with a profound need to be loved by his mother and his sister, even if they left.

Never have I read a novel that has actually made me feel just about the entire array of emotions possible. There were some moments that had me laughing to the point of tears. There were others that were so sad that I had a hard time not tearing up, and at least a few times that were so sexy I was kind of uncomfortable. Anyone who has read the novel will also be familiar with a particular scene that made me furious, and just about stop reading the book. It's a hard book to read in that way, but in another, it would have been impossible for me not to continue at that point. It is a brilliant novel, and a classic, but not for the faint of heart. Be prepared to laugh, cry, scream, and, let's be honest, masturbate.