Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami
Vintage (2006)

By: Nicholas Nocketback

Coming of Age in The East Involves A Touch of Oedipal Prophecy, Conversing With Cats, and Falling Fish—It’s Huck Finn in Japanese, Baby!

Haruki Murakami has for a hot minute been my author of choice. After reading every single word published by him, I believe I may have some insight into his genius, or at the very least, an unhealthy infatuation with the man. Kafka On The Shore is his most recent novel and rides the tsunami wave of success from his previous title Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—one of the sickest pieces of contemporary lit I have yet to lay eyes on, by the way.
In a fantastically weaved tale consisting of two protagonists on a path towards a metaphysical realization, Murakami sets the stage for the impossible to happen in an extraordinarily believable narrative. Kafka Tamura is a fifteen year old boy with an imaginary friend named Crow, an absent mother and sister, and an oedipal prophecy that would make Freud giggle like a Girl Scout with a Tickle Me Elmo in the bathtub. Juxtapose that with the tale of Nakata—an idiot savant that speaks with various feline, and you’ve got an idea of how his mind works. The most beautiful thing is how fully developed each character is (even the minor ones) and how each separate narrative finally comes to fruition.
Like Huckleberry, disenfranchised from his home, fed up with abuse and ennui, Kafka gathers his funds, padding his wallet with a little donation from his pops—unbeknownst to him—and hits the road. Meanwhile, Nakata is drawn to Kafka for reasons he can’t grasp. As in all of Murakami’s novels, the supernatural parallels the natural world and the two become symbiotic. Kafka eventually finds pleasure in fulfilling the prophecy, living in a research library, and confiding in a hermaphrodite librarian, escaping from his natural self. Nakata escapes as well, but his story involves a chance meeting with a Japanese Colonel Sanders pimp, a whore who waxes philosophical, and eventually commits murder in a grisly scene only Murakami could construct.
Haruki relies on his bank of themes and motif: the banality of evil, fate over faith, acceptance of death and the beyond, spirits and their presence in Japan’s underground, and the affect of women on modern man, working women to keep it PG. It is in the vein of Raymond Chandler, and Gogol, and Phillip K. Dick that Murakami wields his pen like a modern day Merlin. Kafka On The Shore is 467 pages of tightly wound suspense, dual sagas, and pure aesthetic brilliance. However, you needn’t take my word for it. Visit your local library and find out for yourself. If you can, I recommend taking a trip to Shikoku, Japan and utilizing their facilities.