Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

I expected so much more from this novel, Murakami’s latest to be translated into English, than I felt it delivered. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of my favorite books, and I have read each of Murakami’s other translated works of fiction with varying degrees of aesthetic satisfaction but never anything less than pure pleasure at the reading experience itself, until now. Kafka on the Shore reveals a different Murakami than the one I am used to. Instead of an extremely nimble and idiosyncratic use of fantasy elements, an overreliance on cheap surrealistic gore and sex. In place of characters who fascinate by their unique and stubborn lack of conformity with conservative standards of accepted behavior, ones who fit only stereotypical patterns of nonconformity (teenage runaway, torch-carrying bereaved lover, the transgendered, the mentally challenged). Instead of an unpredictable plot—or a refreshing apparent plotlessness, which may amount to the same thing—a schematic alternation between two parallel narratives that will (of course) dovetail somewhere toward the end.

One narrative depicts the exploits of Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old boy who flees his domineering father, takes a job in a private library, and is somehow fated to enact a quasi-Oedipal psychodrama: his father dies under mysterious circumstances, and he enters into familial but also sexual relationships with two women, one of whom is a stand-in for the mother who abandoned his father when Kafka was young, the other a stand-in for the older sister she took with her when she left. The second narrative details the story of Nakata, survivor of a mysterious childhood incident that took away many of his mental faculties but left him with the ability to hold conversations with cats. Along the way we are presented with jarring scenarios that wouldn’t feel out of place in big-budget horror or science fiction films, and the whole thing ends rather abruptly, with only the least interesting aspects of the story resolved. The single reminder that this is the Murakami who wrote Wind-Up Bird, Norwegian Wood, or Sputnik Sweetheart is the absolutely trademark sense of utter melancholy that pervades the book, but without the rest of Murakami’s strengths to back it up, it seems that melancholy alone just isn’t enough to power an entire novel.

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