The New Canon: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami - Page 2

Murakami started off as the J.D. Salinger of Japan, rising to fame with his very successful Norwegian Wood (1987). This was straight-forward narrative, without any talking cats, but even here the novelist showed a pronounced interest in off-kilter characters with mental problems of various sorts and degrees, thus presaging his later shift into murkier psychic waters. By the time we get to his masterful The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994), the reader can no longer tell the difference between reality and fantasy. The protagonist can walk through walls and heal people by laying on hands. Or can he? The closer you look at the story, the more it blurs around the edges.

With 2005's Kafka on the Shore, Murakami combines the coming-of-age theme of Norwegian Wood with the magical realism of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The result is a novel that defies the laws of physics as well as the less easily enforced rules of conventional narrative fiction. Yet Murakami also relies on elements familiar from romance and mystery novels. The result is a book without genre or genealogy, and which delights readers by its very unpredictability.

The Kafka of the title is not the novelist Franz Kafka, but a troubled fifteen-year-old named Kafka Tamura, who runs away from a troubled home and disturbed father in hopes of finding his long absent mother. Yet police are soon on the youngster's trail, and hope to interrogate him as a possible suspect in a murder. Is Kafka guilty? In typical Murakami fashion, the author sets out contrary clues that seem to defy conventional notions of guilt and innocence.

Several other rich, puzzling stories are woven into Kafka's tale. Satoru Nakata, a strange old man with paranormal powers he can scarcely control or understand, is one of the most engaging characters in Murakami’s oeuvre. He gets mixed up in the same murder scene that Kafka is fleeing, and he embarks on a strange vision quest to set things aright, accompanied by an amiable truck driver. Much of this extraordinary sub-plot seems to take place in some middle ground between quotidian reality and dream landscape.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.

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