Kafka on the shore
By: Antima Garg
Tags: Fiction, Kafka On The Shore, Japanese Literature, Murakami, Novel

Kafka on the shore paperback cover page

One of the most attractive quality of writing is engagement. This is one of the aspects, among others that kept me hooked to one of the best works of Murakami till the end. The story is beautifully described by moving alternatively between the two central characters, Kafka Tamura and Satoru Nakata. Before delving into those characters, let me mention one more aspect that intrigued me about the story, it really rationalizes the void of logic prevalent in irrational things throughout the novel with the meaning of metaphors.

Coming to the protagonist now, Kafka Tamura is a 15-year-old boy who decides to leave his home in Tokyo and his father and wants to become the toughest fifteen-year-old boy on Earth. His mother and elder sister has already left him when he was just four. There’s also an imaginary boy named Crow that Kafka talks to whenever he finds himself in a stressful situation. There’s a whole topsy-turvy of events following his leaving of home. Quoting a line from the novel, ‘’Chance encounters are great”, Kafka’s fate leads him to meet a girl, Sakura, a few years elder to him. Whether Sakura is the long lost sister of Kafka is though not directly conveyed. Kafka happens to find the Komura Memorial Library in Takamatsu where he meets Oshima and Miss Saeki, who he thinks could be his mother.

Nakata is an old man who has lost his ability to read and write during a childhood incident, ironically he has this strange ability of talking to cats. Nakata, even though, he conveys throughout the story, that he is pretty dumb and doesn’t even have the basic worldly knowledge, is a very deep character. Nakata knows that he has to find a magical mysterious white stone, ‘the entrance stone’, which leads to a different world. So, if Nakata would not be a part of the story, the mystical essence would not have been there. The simplicity of Nakata and his power to yet turn the things around in the story makes him even more likeable.

The interesting element in the story is that you can’t find logic behind strange occurrences like the fish and leeches rain, the time as a non-linear entity, the man who has no form, the mystical flute, ability to talk to cats but when all the dots are connected, they do form meaning. The shore could be a symbol of the separation of the two worlds, conscious and unconscious one. Kafka’s dreams could also be a bridge between the two worlds. As, in his dreams, he always found Miss Saeki to be the fifteen-year-old teenage girl. This story might not make sense to people overtly looking for logic behind things but a wonderful read for the believers of logic behind fate.

I think, Murakami is an amazing writer because everyone who reads his work get lost in the whirl of riddles whose answers could be found by the reader’s interpretation only. This reminds me of one of the lines in the novel which goes like, “It’s all a question of imagination, our responsibility begins with the power to imagine”. To imagine a place where the concept of time fades away, to align the worlds of reality and dream, is also characteristic of our own wish to escape reality fenced by our morbid thoughts.

This is an excerpt from the book which is a beautiful read