There are some novels that I wish I had read as part of a class. Kafka on the Shore is one of them. I put Haruki Murakami as an author on my fall reading list to uphold a promise to my friend Chandrakala (CK) in Hyderabad. While I lived in India, I tried to read only novels by Indian authors, but having grown up there, CK wasn’t as interested in Arundhati Roy or Anita Desai as I was. She encouraged me to try Murakami, who is a Japanese writer. So finally, in November/December I did.
The relationship between this Japanese book and my memories of India doesn’t stop with CK, though. Several of the feelings this book evoked for me are similar to how I responded to Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie–one of the books I read while in Hyderabad. Both are characterized as magical realism.
Kafka on the Shore has two interrelated plots. The odd chapters focus on Kafka, a 15-year-old boy who runs away from home and winds up working at a small private library. Even chapters revolve around Nakata, an old man who experienced childhood trauma that limited his mental capacity. “Nakata’s not too bright,” he often tells people; yet he also strange/supernatural abilities, like talking to cats and opening “the entrance stone.”
The first similarity between Kafka on the Shore and Midnight’s Children is its sheer density and thus the time it took to read. It’s not that the plot was difficult to follow, but that at the end, I felt that I would need to read it again to catch more of the themes and subtleties. I don’t think I’m alone, since Murakami has said the following:
The key to understanding the novel lies in reading it multiple times. Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren’t any solutions provided. Instead several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader.
The novel’s other significant similarity to Midnight’s Children is that in both novels the author plays with the idea of time and inevitably. Although the relationship between the plot’s events isn’t always totally clear, the fact that the pieces must connect moves the story along. This modality is encapsulated on page 435 of Kafka on the Shore:
Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there–to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there.
In sum, Kafka on the Shore, like Midnight’s Children, is a labyrinth for literature lovers: you can enjoy the basic story and skillful narrative, or you can dive deeper and lose yourself in twists and turns of the author’s mind.