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 haruki murakami
Talking cats and falling fish from the Wind-Up author. Kafka On The Shore, Haruki Murakami’s tenth novel, entwines the fates of 15-year-old Kafka Tamura and mentally deficient pensioner Nakata, who talks to cats and causes fish to fall from cloudless skies. Kafka flees home in the hope of escaping the Oedipal curse laid upon him by his unloving father, that he will sleep with both his mother and sister (who both ran off when he was four) after murdering pops. Along the way, corporate logos Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders cameo, respectively, as a cat killer with plans to swallow every soul in the world and a back-alley pimp. So far, so Murakami - the most popular Japanese author abroad, and, after his untypically straightforward 1987 love story, Norwegian Wood, sold over 3m copies, a one-man literary industry at home. Murakami novels, though, despite or more often because of their popularity, never fail to divide critics and readers alike. And there’s often a fair amount to take issue with. Aside from Norwegian Wood and the brooding South Of The Border, West of the Sun, his fiction tends towards a chaotic, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to theme and plotting. If Murakami was a Muppet, he would be the Swedish Chef. When this scattershot approach works, such as in his 1995 masterpiece The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (which David Mitchell probably prays to), or 1985’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World, of which Kafka On The Shore is essentially an extension, the effect is the literary equivalent of a Rotterdam warehouse party choreographed by Busby Berkeley. The musical analogy is fitting, as Murakami habitually peppers his stories with references to his aural obsessions, from Getz and Coltrane (he and his wife ran a jazz club for seven years) to The Beatles and Mozart. But recurring riffs aside, the dominant theme in all of Murakami’s books, fiction and non-fiction alike (1997’s Underground comprises interviews with victims of the Aum Shinrikyo cult which gassed the Tokyo subway in 1995), is loss. It’s here again in Kafka’s pining for parental affection and in Nakata’s vague recollections of a mysterious childhood episode that stripped him of his personality. Kafka On The Shore is as Murakami as they come: gripping, ragged, thought-provoking, funny and largely inexplicable. If the Möbius-strip illogicality of a movie like Lynch’s Lost Highway gives you palpitations then steer well clear. But if, as Kakfa muses of The Arabian Nights, the thought of stories that “have this sort of vital, living sense of play, of freedom that common sense can’t keep bottled up” appeals, then come on in, the water’s lovely.
Chris Power
Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami, out now published by The Harvill Press.
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