Kafka on The Shore - Lunchtime Lit with Mel

Internet memes abound about Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The subject of most of these is how he is always the bridesmaid, never the bride, in the Nobel Prize hunt, sitting anxiously by the phone with a Cutty Sark in hand, waiting in vain for word from the Stockholm committee. They show him exchanging an empathetic embrace with Leonardo DiCaprio, another frequent nominee with no wins until recently, when the actor reversed his own Chicago Cubs curse by finally grabbing the Oscar. They display Murakami in near-compromising positions with cats, who cough up their sticky hairballs across the pages of his novels. There are memes about how he loves to bare his rather uninspiring torso in long distance running, because when he runs he doesn't have to talk to, or listen to anybody else talk.

I have seen Murakami memes in English, French, and particularly Spanish, Spain being the country in which Murakami's Nobel loss to musician Bob Dylan's seems to have particularly struck a nerve. Only in his native Japan do people seem to not really care about Murakami.

As for myself and my son, whose books I always abscond away with despite his futile protests about how I stain and sully them over the course of my Lunchtime Lit readings, we have our own in-house set of Murakami memes. We laugh about how his mundane, rather humorless characters do oddball things like cook spaghetti for breakfast. We get a kick about how one mundane character spends endless mundane pages sitting on her back patio, reading mundane Proust while waiting for another equally mundane character to show up via some unbelievably mundane plot twist.

When push comes to shove, however, we are always on board for the next mundane Murakami book, because there is something inexplicably riveting about his mundaneness.

But can the author of Super Frog Saves Tokyo be worthy of Nobel Prize consideration? That is another mundane question for another mundane day.

*Three other titles, with a total estimated word count of 1,098,400 and 152 lunchtimes consumed, have been reviewed under the guidelines of this series.

**Word counts are estimated by hand counting a statistically significant 23 pages, then extrapolating this average page count across the entire book.

In Kafka on The Shore. 15 year old Kafka Tamura runs away from home before he can fulfill his prophesied destiny of killing his father and having sex with his mother. On a hunch, he flees to the seaside city of Takamatsu, where he lives and works in a library. Kafka does not know it, but it is in Takamatsu that he will fulfill his Oedipal curse.

Meanwhile Mr. Nakata, an illiterate, apparently autistic old man who can actually converse with cats, also journeys to Takamatsu after killing Johnnie Walker, an evil cat killer who looks just like his whiskey bottle namesake. Apart from inducing chronic alcoholism, Johnnie Walker has foul designs on humanity. Although he doesn't know it yet, in Takamatsu Nakata must find Kafka, whose destiny is linked with his own, obtain a device called the entrance stone to let some unknown something through, then close it before another unknown something can get out.

If it sounds weird, it's because it is. Weirdness abounds in all of Murakami's books, which are sometimes labeled as "magical realism." Enshrouded in this weirdness are other intertwined themes that Murakami recycles throughout his novels, and I will analyze those squashed aluminum cans here.

Murakami's heroes generally either a:) have no friends or family, b:)have abandoned their friends and family on purpose, or c:) have been abandoned by their friends and family. Although these characters appear slightly disappointed by this state of affairs, they don't seem to be in a real big hurry to do anything about it, although a mostly accidental search eventually does take place.

The result is a rather lackluster quest to cure the main character of his or her loneliness, even if said character doesn't particularly mind it. In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Toru Okada is looking for his missing wife. In Kafka on The Shore, Kafka Tamura is seeking his mother. In 1Q84, Tengo Kawana searches for both his mother and a lost love, while his lost love Green Bean is on an equally uninspiring search to find him.

When the Murakami hero finally gets off his ass to do something, he rarely gets off his ass. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the hero engages the forces of evil while dreaming in the bottom of an empty well. In Super Frog Saves Tokyo, unconscious Katagari helps Frog battle a foul, earthquake-inducing worm burrowing beneath the Japanese Capital. In Kafka on The Shore, catspeak translator Mr. Nakata sinks into days-long sleeping sessions during which he receives revelations about how to save the human race. Murakami isn't exactly the king of the gun-slinging action hero. His good guys are a rather lethargic bunch - bad-ass for sure, but boring.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Murakami was also a finalist for the slightly less prestigious Bad Sex in Fiction award, doled out by the British publication Literary Review. To keep things PG-13 here, I won't go into any explicit detail about the sex acts Murakami depicts in the pages of his novels, suffice it to say that they are borderline weird. Furthermore, his characters don't get busy between the sheets purely for the sake of amusement or love. Instead, there is always a vaguely ritualistic purpose behind the carnal acts. Murakami sex opens up a portal with a parallel world, it is used to disseminate the biological seed vicariously through an intermediary, it cleanses people of spiritual impurities.

In Kafka on The Shore, Mr. Nakata's friend Hoshino must have sex with a beautiful prostitute in order to prepare himself for his procurement of the entrance stone which will be used to save the world. Later in the story, Kafka Tamura engages in a highly taboo sex act for no reason other than to fulfill some a prophecy that his murdered father made. Murakami does not condemn or apologize for this often unsavory intercourse, we are simply asked to accept it as a necessary part of the plot resolution.

As a mailman of 23 years, I can tell you that on every Postal route there is at least one cat lady. Cat ladies own, or are owned by, upwards of dozens of cats. In one of these cat lady's houses I know of, the felines even come and go as they please through an open bathroom window.

Not surprisingly, some of these cat lady's homes smell like cat pee, a rather unredolent aroma with a distinctive eau de ammonia that does not evoke pleasant images. On some cat lady properties, the odor is pervasive and suffocating.

I would not be surprised if Haruki Murakami's home reeks of cat piss. Although he is not a cat lady, he is certainly the masculine equivalent. I'll wager that when Murakami's mailman goes to the author's door, he has to plug his nose or breathe through a mask.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle springs into action when a cat runs away from home. In 1Q84 Tengo reads a story to his comatose father about a town of cats where a wayward human must hide from the felines by night and emerge by day to go about his activities. In Kafka On The Shore, not only do cats play a significant role in the plot, it is actually a speaking role, exchanging cat pleasantries and preoccupations with Mr. Nakata, who is fluent in their raspy tongue.

Haruki Murakami has been called a very non-Japanese author by certain critics among his countrymen. This accusation is made based upon his glorification of Western music, philosophy, and literature.

But Murakami also leans heavily on The Tale of Genji, which some experts identify as the world's first novel. Genji is a voluminous endeavor written by an aristocratic Japanese woman around 1021 AD. The book describes Japanese courtly custom, but also exposes the popular mythology and superstition of its period.

Among other themes, The Tale of Genji contends that spirits are spawned from both the living and the dead, the living bringing about ghostly hauntings through the power of their intense emotions. We see this in Kafka On The Shore, when Kafka's love interest, Mrs. Saeki, produces a wraithlike specter of her younger self that haunts the main character in his room at night. Also In Kafka, significant activity occurs at uniquely Japanese Shinto shrines, a sign that Japanese culture plays as much a role as the author's Western references.

Not being Japanese, perhaps I am not qualified to say this, but could Murakami's works delve into the Japanese juxtaposition of East and West better than those of critics who accuse him of not being faithful to his homeland? Maybe Murakami grasps the dichotomy of two highly different cultures that do not touch, but lay atop one another like parallel Universes.

After reading this review, you might be asking yourself why this mailman didn't quit deviating down side streets and just deliver Kafka On The Shore? Truth is, Murakami stories are interchangeable. You review one, you review them all. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

The proof is in the pudding, chocolate jello pudding to be precise, that I frequently spill on the pages I review, to my son's severe chagrin. The numbers don't lie. To date, I have reviewed 3 Murakami books for Lunchtime Lit. This represents a full 30% of the total. If Murakami is so slow-moving, you ask, why do I keep coming back?

The answer could be that Murakami reads at the pace of life. Each novel is a miniature existence of its own, perhaps taking place on some parallel plane, subject to its own unique laws of physics. The Murakami reader is an explorer into this strange new Universe, and anxiously forges ahead to discover what the facts about this world truly are. The fact that the facts are never fully revealed makes the exploration even more satisfying. The Murakami Universe is a fascinating place to hang out, to listen to Bach or Beethoven on the back patio while reading Chekhov or Proust under a two-moon sky.

Or just maybe I return because the Murakami books are sitting there so temptingly upon my son's bookshelf, ready to steal and stain.