Introduction
Book Name- Kafka On The Shore
Author Name- Murakami
Genre- Fiction
Language- English
About The Author
Western culture, particularly Western music and literature, has had a strong effect on Murakami. He grew up reading works by American writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and his Western inspirations frequently set him apart from other Japanese writers.
Murakami met his wife, Yoko, while studying acting at Waseda University in Tokyo. His first employment was at a record store, where one of his key characters in Norwegian Wood, Toru Watanabe, works. Murakami and his wife launched the coffeehouse 'Peter Cat,' which was a jazz bar in the evening in Kokubunji, Tokyo, just before completing his studies.
About the Book
Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an ageing simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn towards Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their journey, as unknown to them as it is to us, is supplemented with vibrant companions and enthralling incidents.
Cats and humans converse, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest housing soldiers who appear to have not aged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identities of both the victim and the perpetrator unknown—yet this, like everything else, is eventually revealed, just as the intertwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.
Personal Review
Haruki Murakami's foresightful and poetic work Kafka on the Shore depicts a brilliance I haven't seen since reading Bukowski's Women. Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old stowaway who runs away from home, embarks on an existential quest to discover who he truly is. Murakami's seamless technique of studying the human psyche via a rigorous, but lyrical brilliance that at times just keeps you contemplating and questioning.
The narrative is a two-strander that unravels slowly. In the first strand, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura (whose true name is never revealed) flees Tokyo and his sculptor-father, who kills cats to manufacture flutes out of their souls. Kafka ends up in Takamatsu, a regional city on Shikoku, Japan's smallest major island. Here, the cross-gender librarian of a private library, Oshima, and its enigmatic owner, Mrs Saeki, give work and home to the mature-beyond-his-years fugitive.
The second strand opens with an X-File recorded by American Occupation troops and tells the story of a group of wartime refugees scavenging for food in the Shikoku mountains when they saw a potential UFO before losing consciousness for many hours. Except for one youngster, Nakata, who remained in a coma, everyone recovered.
Five decades later, while working as a stray home cat finder, Kafka's father (acting as "Jack Daniels") coerces Nakata into stabbing him to death in a "kill me or the cats get it" scenario. Back in strand one, Kafka falls in love with Mrs Saeki's 15-year-old ghost and has an affair with his boss Mrs Saeki, who is actually old enough to be his mother, which she may be. Kafka travels to earth in Oshima's mountain cabin to avoid the inquiry into his father's death.
He discovers the entrance to a semi-real hinter world in the depths of the surrounding trees. Meanwhile, Nakata, whose attempted murder confession is rejected as mere dementia, follows a psychic urge westwards in the company of a drop-out truck driver, Hoshino, all the way to Takamatsu, Shikoku. Here the novel's two strands braid themselves together.
Kafka on the Shore is a parable. It is not bound by rules or logic, and its application is not a concern. It both fills and depletes you. A flurry of emotions is there, and you can't seem to decide which of the many various realisations that are rushing you is the most essential. Waves crash repeatedly on the beach of your awareness, and at first, you resist, but after a while, you realise that your battle is futile, so you surrender. You read you feel, and you attempt to grasp and make sense of it all.
Written By– Greeshma Chowdary
Edited By- Nidhi Jha
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