“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions.
You change direction but the sandstorm chases you.
You turn again, but the storm adjusts.
Over and over you play this out,
like some ominous dance with death just before dawn.
Why?
Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away…
This storm is you. Something inside of you.”
This quote,
from the first chapter of Haruki Murakami’s "Kafka on the Shore,"
captures the teenage protagonist's turmoil.
Desperate to escape his tyrannical father
and the family curse he feels doomed to repeat,
he renames himself Kafka after his favorite author
and runs away from home.
But memories of a missing mother,
along with dreams that haunt his waking life,
prove more difficult to outrun.
Published in Japanese in 2002
and translated into English three years later,
"Kafka on the Shore" is an epic literary puzzle
filled with time travel, hidden histories, and magical underworlds.
Readers delight in discovering how the mind-bending imagery,
whimsical characters and eerie coincidences fit together.
Kafka narrates every second chapter,
with the rest centering on an old man named Satoru Nakata.
After awakening from a coma he went into during the Second World War,
Nakata loses the ability to read and write–
but gains a mysterious knack for talking to cats.
When he’s asked to tail a missing pet,
he’s thrown onto a dangerous path that runs parallel to Kafka’s.
Soon prophecies come true, portals to different dimensions open up–
and fish and leeches begin raining from the sky.
But what ties these two characters together–
and is it a force either one of them can control?
The collision of different worlds is a common thread
in Haruki Murakami’s work.
His novels and short stories often forge fantastic connections
between personal experience,
supernatural possibilities, and Japanese history.
Born in Kyoto in 1949,
Murakami grew up during the post-World War II
American occupation of Japan.
The shadow of war hung over his life as it does his fiction;
"Kafka on the Shore" features biological attacks,
military ghosts and shady conspiracies.
Murakami’s work blurs historical periods
and draws from multiple cultural traditions.
References to Western society and Japanese customs
tumble over each other,
from literature and fashion to food and ghost stories.
He has a penchant for musical references, too,
especially in "Kafka on the Shore."
As the runaway Kafka wanders the streets of a strange city,
Led Zeppelin and Prince keep him company.
Soon, he takes refuge in an exquisite private library.
While he spends his days poring over old books
and contemplating a strange painting and the library’s mysterious owner,
he also befriends the librarian–
who introduces him to classical music like Schubert.
This musical sensibility makes Murakami’s work
all the more hypnotic.
He frequently bends the line between reality and a world of dreams,
and is considered a master of magic lurking in the mundane.
This is a key feature of magical realism.
In contrast to fantasy,
magic in this sort of writing rarely offers a way out of a problem.
Instead, it becomes just one more thing that complicates life.
In "Kafka on the Shore,"
characters are faced with endless otherworldly distractions,
from a love sick ghost to a flute made from cat souls.
These challenges offer no easy answers.
Instead, they leave us marveling at the resourcefulness
of the human spirit to deal with the unexpected.
While Kafka often seems suspended in strangeness,
there’s a tenderness and integrity at the heart of his mission
that keeps him moving forward.
Gradually he comes to accept his inner confusion.
In the end, his experience echoes the reader’s:
the deeper you go, the more you find.