KAFKA ON THE SHORE (Review)
Haruki Murakami
From the very beginning, the cast was broken in every possible way. I know it’s going to be a heavy journey because it is Murakami.
The entire concept might feel abstract, but the absurdity of what happens is what makes a Murakami book memorable. Kafka on the Shore was a random pick. I always adored the level of his intimacy, but I never had the time to read a Murakami for a long time. But once you start reading, it’s difficult to stop consuming his writing.
The book is a mix of a lot of scenes that one may find curious, interesting, or even disgusting. The way the book conveys its sense of secrecy is outlandish.
The book travels through a lot of realistic and radical changes, and we too travel with each page as the intensity increases its volume slowly. If you ask bluntly, do you love the book? Yes, the answer may come with a pause, then proceed for an explanation. I love a lot of the impactful dialogue in the book, but are you involved with the politics the book puts forward? No, it’s complicated.
The flow of writing into each new character’s journey is described in a detailed manner. Each character remains in our brain even after finishing this book, along with a lot of corollaries that follow.
The story is about a connection between a lot of people and how eventually something happened because of something else happened in the past or the circle of life — the repercussions of intense love.
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The story starts with the description of a fifteen-year-old boy, Kafka Tamura (as that’s what he likes to be called), trying to run away from his home, moving along with the days he spent getting ready to leave, and finally reaching a library in Takamatsu, and meeting another bunch of interesting people. Every character is bobbled up with a bundle of edgy scenes. Picking a favorite character is indeed difficult because each person is presented with a very deep sense of reality while still carrying irrationality. The Liberian whom Kafka proceeded to meet and Miss Saeki established their territory at a constant pace.
The lifestyle of Kafka is very fluent; he is the strongest fifteen-year-old and travels through major life incidents growing up. His unpleasant relationship with his father and the trauma left behind after his mom left Kafka and his father, moved out along with his sister, made the boy even stronger yet broken.
The main inclusion of each personality in the story made a deeper connection to his book. The discussion Kafka has with Oshimo is not any random topic picked up by a fifteen-year-old. The long chats about Japanese poets and the early writing of the lost era make us realize the magnitude of the boy’s knowledge about the living and dead.
The portrayal of his loneliness is beautifully written, and the amount of detail put into it is unreasonably on point. Nobody can write about loneliness as beautifully as Murakami.
Another important character that is deeply involved in the story is Nakata, a person with the ability to talk to cats, and his companion, Hoshima. Both stories happen simultaneously without disrupting the core idea of the story. The events occurring in their lives and the connection with which they meet increase with the speed of the story.
The unusual behavior and incidents that happen in the book are not justified correctly, but we can understand as the story moves along the capabilities of each of them. The relationship that builds up between them and how Hoshimo became important to Nakata and vice versa in the context was intriguing to read.
With all these included, the part of disproval comes regarding the arrangement of the female character in the writer’s story; in most of them, the female characters, are made into property rather than a character. I can’t fathom the concepts of sexualizing women and finding them common, but I think that’s how the writer has seen women. The author never leaves a chance to objectify women and their feelings; the characters and their covertness are built up beautifully, and then suddenly he makes a fall by objectifying them hollowly. Some of the episodes about the prophecy that Kafka has and how to make it come true are dark and uninteresting. As a reader, I cannot fully agree with the author’s description of women in general. All women are just toys for sex is a wrong statement that solemnly touches on in the writing.
The book is connected to nature; the description of the forest and Kafka’s life itself makes for a poem. There is a part where he talks about morality when talking to Miss Saeki, where Kafka explains, “The strength I am looking for isn’t the kind where you win or lose. I am not after a wall that will repel power coming from outside. What I want is the kind of strength and quiet to be able to absorb that outside power and stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things — unfairness, misfortune, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings”.
The whole story is a journey through many lives, inside and out. The creation of something results in the movement of other things. This book has its faults, confusions, and outranged commotion, yet the journey through the endless life, not knowing the next stop, is thrillingly original. This is a work of originality and unlimited knowledge derived from nature and given back to it in another form elsewhere.
