Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore: A Micro and Macro Path Forward

 

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami, Coming of Age, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, review no spoilers

I was recently in San Francisco at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s annual convention.  While there, I went to Japan town to a stationary store.  My obsession with fountain pens leads me to also be interested in ink and paper, and the Japanese make some of the finest paper in the world (one of their secrets, apparently, is to mix some hardwood into softwood pulp used to make paper – allowing for incredibly thin paper that is non-absorbent and doesn’t bleed through to the other side).  After being a little overwhelmed by all the washi tape and stamps and other accessories for sale in the store, I walked across the hall to a Japanese bookstore.

I probably should have asked one of the storekeepers for help, but instead, standing in front of the fiction shelves, realizing that I had not, to my knowledge, read any Japanese literature, I Googled Japanese novels to read.  The first review was about some current book, but the author of the review mentioned having read Murakami – including, he or she said, “of course, Kafka on the Shore.”  Well, when I looked at that book on the shelf and compared it to the other Murakami books, I thought, “Oh no, another one of these long, difficult masterpieces that is going to be impenetrable.”

I have read War and Peace – I quite enjoyed it actually, but I am currently only halfway through Moby Dick, and Infinite Jest took, to my mind infinite patience to read, and I gave up 3/8ths of the way through it.  Coincidentally, one of my patients mentioned on my return a recent New Yorker article that I also haven’t read suggesting that books like Infinite Jest are marathons intended to test the reader’s endurance – their ability to take on another’s perspective and look at the world through their eyes.  Well, some tests are too long, some bars are too high, and some perspectives are a bridge too far for me.

I thought about picking up one of the shorter books, but I was in San Francisco alone, had just finished a book, and I had a long flight home – so, why not?  Let’s see if I can make it to the end of this one…

Surprisingly, this book was, for me, a real page turner.  I looked forward to returning to my hotel every night to re-enter this magical, nearby world that was both mildly foreign – Japan is a different country, but it has highways and towns and cities and forests – and totally, completely different and yet, somehow, familiar as a dream scape – as the kind of world that you discover when, as a young man, you take off and find out that the world is both held together all over the place – and also infinitely variable and your place in it moves from relative certainty to being unknown and open to question almost everything once you step out of the door (or through the back of the closet).  And the feeling of this space is both terrifying and exciting and also terribly lonely.  You feel cut off from the rest of the world – as the hero in this book becomes – but also as the reader, I became. 

It felt odd to be reading a book that I so thoroughly enjoyed – while feeling that so many people that I know might not like it at all – they might feel too threatened or disoriented or repulsed by the raw violence or the raw sexuality – that the dream scape that this artist creates would be one that many readers would want to be wakened from because of its nightmarish qualities, but that I was consuming like manna.

I suppose my reading of 100 Years of Solitude – a million years ago and long before I could make sense of it (or even thought of blogging) – was like this reading, only at that time I was so confused I just wanted the dream to end, though, even then, I was compelled to finish that book (and I sense this means I might quite like it now).   

Because this book reads more like a dream than a straightforward narrative arc, I don’t know that I will be able to give a veridical account of what happened in it.  Or rather, if I give my account it is unlikely to match yours, and that is fine.  This is not, by the way because the book lacks structure.  It is very well organized and structured – like the best dreams… But like the best dreams, it can be accurately interpreted in multiple ways and, because Murakami is a consummate story teller, it becomes our dream – we participate in it with our own mind, so our experience of it is valid, even if it doesn’t square with someone else’s valid experience.

(I serve on a research committee.  It is a psychoanalytic research committee – but the explanation I offered above would simply not fly with a research committee.  We propose only testable hypotheses, they would say, and when we test them, we discard those that would not work.  The tension between that position and the more analytic position about flexible realities I have taken above is part of what makes serving on that committee both delicious and frustrating.)

So – this book is structured as a description of the movement through time of two individuals.  One of them, Kafka, is a fifteen year old boy.  His are the odd numbered chapters.  He has led a bleak life as the son of a remote sculptor whose wife (Kafka’s mother) and daughter (Kafka’s sister) left him when Kafka was so young that he has at best fragmentary memories of her.  The father destroyed whatever pictures there were of his mother (save for one that is hidden and that Kafka discovers) and was so bitter that he lays an Oedipal curse on him.  Kafka, not surprisingly decides, with the help of his alter ego, Crow, to run away from home and seek his fortune.

Though I worked at a halfway house for runaway teenagers, I never ran away from home.  That said, I did go hitchhiking and I had the fantasy of putting a canoe in the Olentangy River and taking it out only when I reached New Orleans.  This Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn fantasy was realized when I rode my bicycle (with a friend) 1500 miles home at the end of my Junior year of college.

The other individual, who is the centerpiece of all of the even numbered chapters, was injured by a supernatural event – or perhaps by something much more personal but traumatic – in either case he is left in a state of helpless, but very sweet dependence.  His superpower is his ability to talk to cats – but also to wait indefinitely.  He is in no hurry to get anywhere, has had most of his cognitive abilities erased and he refers to himself in the third person.  “Mr. Nakata would be happy to find your cat,” he might say.

These stories, the story of Kafka seemingly straightforward, and the story of Mr. Nakata filled with magical and other worldly events, seem to be related – and when they cross over it seems almost accidental – as if the author didn’t see it coming any more than we did.  Indeed, in the anniversary edition of the book that I read, the author had a preface in which he stated that his writing of this book (and I think his writing in general) involves a sort of taking of dictation from what he describes as another world – going over to this mysterious place and bringing back the writing from it.

The magical quality of this “shadow” story appeals to both my more childish self – the kid who believed in all kinds of magic – from Santa Clause to ESP – and to my analytic identity with its affinity for dream images where the shackles of empirical living have fallen off.  Is it plausible that Mr. Nakata is speaking to cats and that fish fall out of the sky when he opens his umbrella?  No, but it is equally implausible that he lives in a place where, when he decides to go on a trip, people are taken with him – they feel compassion for him and comfort in his presence and they not only buy him meals but take up his crazy quest – they, too, believe in magic and get back in touch with aspects of themselves that they have shed in order to enter into and live in the adult world.  And yet, that is the world that I want to live in and have more often than not.

I was listening to a podcast about erotic love this week, and one of its central theses is that the Genesis story is about how erotic love creates centrifugal force that pulls children out of the centripetal force field of the nuclear family.  I think that what gets depicted in this book, with its Oedipal theme, is a kind of have your cake and eat it too coming of age story. 

To get through this novel, you have to survive both the violence – and it comes from the unexpected source of kind Mr. Nakata and the awful world he gets pulled into before heading off to somehow meet up with Kafka, and the sex – this is an Oedipally constructed tale.  And it is not just Oedipus, but Jack Daniels, Colonel Sanders, and Elvis, along with a host of other Western artifacts that make their appearance here.  I suppose I should not be surprised after having recently seen a Five Guys restaurant on the Champs Elysee, but the mixture of Western and Japanese culture into something that feels like an intentional blend helps support the other worldliness combined with the familiar that makes this feel uncanny – that connects me, as a western reader, to a foreign world that is infused with familiar objects.

Despite the violence – I felt strangely comforted by this polyglot world.  The Anime invasion that I see at comic- con events feels less intrusive and more like the Japanese are returning the favor of our cultural sharing/intrusion.  Perhaps we are moving towards a world that is interconnected and reasonably comfortable with that as a way of functioning, creating the discomfort that is leading to conservative efforts to thwart international trade.  It feels like it is too late to close that door and we will learn that soon (or perish). 

But there is also a kind of calm that feels distinctly Japanese.  Mr. Nakata, in particular, feels safe as he travels across the country.  There is a sense of community and caring for others that feels expected and reliable – something that takes place without fanfare.  There is also a comfort with getting to know strangers and looking out for them.  Ironically, this may be partially driven by a monoculture.  Perhaps one day we will have a global monoculture?  We will be able to trust each other because we know that, wherever we grew up, we learned how to be human.

Though that last sentence is, I think, largely true now.  I think if we were plopped down into a village - a ghetto - or a suburb anywhere on the planet, I think we would discover different ways of achieving goals, but I think we would find common values and would be able to recognize how those were being expressed - and recognize that they were functional to a greater or lesser extent.  Over time, we could interrogate our differences and achieve the Jimmy Carter approved message in Voyager 1 that though we are still a bunch of nation/states we are working toward "a single global civilization.universal/world government."   

Ultimately, though, the story is, I think, about the process of transitioning away from the family romance to a kind of courage to function autonomously while being in contact with those around us.  Perhaps because of reading this book, I was musing about the folly of the Japanese attaching the United States during the Second World War.  Japanese autonomy, like British autonomy, emanated from a small island country that imagined itself capable of manhandling those around it.  Of course, since then, the world has become a much bigger place.  I am drawn back into musing about the macro – who isn’t, these days – and about the U.S. imagining of itself as the dominant world power that doesn’t need to rely on others.  We need to be autonomous and in contact with – supporting and being supported by – those around us.  Achieving this delicate state of balance is challenging for both individuals and for nations.  

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Manet and Morisot in San Francisco

 Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Art History, San Francisco

Immediately before the American Psychoanalytic Association’s San Francisco midwinter convention, there was a forecast of snowmageddon that might shut down numerous airports.  I rescheduled my flight from Monday to Saturday, and my hotel was happy to accommodate my staying a couple of extra days, so I found myself to be a footloose San Francisco tourist.  I had been there with the family long ago, when we did things the kids wanted to do, like go to Alcatraz, and things we dragged them to, like SFMOMA, and I had been the year before also to the meetings, but my experience was largely limited to downtown and the north shore.  So I decided to walk from downtown out to the Legion of Honor, a traditional art museum in the northwest corner of the city, stopping to indulge my fountain pen and stationaryinterests in Japan town along the way.

The slice of San Francisco – Geary Street – that I traversed felt like a bigger, more sprawlly version of two towns near me here in Ohio: Athens and Yellow Springs.  Both are college towns and have a bit of a hippie vibe, and the housing and shops in all three seem to have a sort of Shabby Chic, with fresh paint not seeming to be in high demand.  It is as if the choices in color that were made a generation ago have only improved with age while fading into a comfortable, lived in tone.

Rodin -
Christ and the
Magdelin

The Legion of Honor is approached by making a right turn through a public golf course that looks, to this non-golfers eye, to be challenging if, for no other reason, than that the changes in elevation are considerable.  Had I made a left turn a little earlier, I would have gone to the DeYoung Museum of American Art.  Apparently DeYoung (who, along with Hearst, had an eponymous downtown building) was competing with the benefactors of Legion of Honor.  I can’t speak to who won, because the DeYoung was closed on Monday, when I intended to visit it, but the Legion of Honor is a Solid museum outlining the history of Western Art with a particular focus on a very nice collection of Rodin sculptures, including an erotic marble sculpture of Mary Magdalen bring Christ down from the cross – one that the curators note is his only overtly biblical sculpture.

But the reason to write about this museum trip is not to describe their standing collection, but instead to highlight a special show reimagining the relationship between Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Berthe Morisot (1841–1895).  Manet was older and used the younger Morisot as a model, and he convinced her to marry his brother.  The received wisdom is that he was her mentor and guide as she entered into and joined the impressionist movement that Manet had helped to found.  This narrative allowed Morisot to get somewhat lost in Manet’s shadow.

Manet - Berthe Morisot 
with a bouquet of
violets

The show brings together paintings and describes them as artifacts of a relationship in which Morisot pushed and propelled Manet every bit as much as he instructed her.  The curators present them as peers, but my read, informed by them, was a bit different.  I think that Morisot was trying to instruct Manet, an exemplar of the male gaze, in how to appreciate the female perspective.  Another way of saying that is that Morisot was anticipating Freud’s female patients by about fifty years. 

Freud’s patients helped Freud move from the objective point of view of treaters of the day like Charcot, who would hypnotize his patients and show them to his fellow neurologists to marvel at the vagaries of hysteria – a supposedly female disorder.  When Freud listened to, instead of observing, his female patients, he discovered that the, too, had a hysterical personality.  Indeed, that he had an entire inner world that had been unknown to him.  That said, he also imposed the dominant masculine perspective of the day on the women that he treated – and he seemed, later in his career, to recognize that he never truly was able to see the world through their eyes.

Charcot hypnotizing

Similarly, Morisot had a willing student in Manet, but one who continued to value the masculine perspective, never quite being able to make the radical shift that completely taking on the female gaze might have afforded him.  Like the feminists who would pick up Freud’s work – horrified by it, but also drawn to his attempts to understand women and using his insights as a springboard to more clearly articulate women’s minds – Morisot, in her own work, painted with the mind of a woman, pushing Manet forward, but also appreciating women as engaged with the world, not simply observed by it.

Manet - Luncheon on the grass

Manet was a well-established painter, if one teetering on penury, when he first crossed paths with Morisot.  Two of his masterpieces had shocked the Parisian art world when they were shown.  He submitted The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) to the Paris Salon of 1863.  It was rejected and shown in the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected).  It depicts a nude model sitting in a Parisian Park with fully dressed gentlemen.  While it references classical subjects, it does so in a novel way and is credited with being the first example of Modern Art.  Depicting contemporaries rather than classical subjects per se or famous or important figures was part of what distinguished this from the accepted style of the time.

Manet - Olympia

Manet followed this with Olympia in 1865, a depiction of a nude, but not as a chaste alabaster skinned near goddess, but, again, as a contemporary – and as a prostitute.  Someone who was brashly displaying herself, even as her African servant delivers flowers from an admirer.  A cat, also a symbol of female sexuality (a friend from France assures me that pussy is used to the same effect in French as in English) further underlines the overt sexuality of the painting.

So, Manet is both breaking with tradition – portraying people as they actually are, rather than idealizing them, and he is taking a traditional approach – the women in both of these paintings, while they observe us observing them, are clearly on display; they are objects to be viewed, primarily by men.  This, of course, is mirrored by Freud, who, forty or fifty years later speaks frankly with women about their sexuality and their sexual experiences and fantasies, breaking tradition, but retains a kind of tin ear approach to what these women are saying, filtering their words through his world view as he describes them to his medical peers.

Manet-
The Balcony

In 1868, Manet meets Morisot and he begins to paint her and to admire (and edit) her work.  His first portrait of her is a group painting of three people in the light and one in shadow.  Morisot is the woman on the lower left of the painting The Balcony.  She is a member of the upper class, and Manet is not, and he depicts her as an object – perhaps, some have speculated, of desire.  The shadowed figure, by the way, is a man who is the child of Manet’s father’s (August) lover.  The lover, after the death of his father, became Manet’s lover.  It is not clear whether the child, then, is Manet’s half-brother or his illegitimate son, but he is an illegitimate relative.

Morisot, too, became a relative.  While Manet was painting Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872), Manet successfully convincing Morisot to marry his brother, which she happily did.  He also managed, during this time, though, to thoroughly anger Morisot.  She had nearly finished a painting of her sister and mother which she intended to enter into the Salon, but she was dissatisfied with it.  Manet came to her studio and, on the day the people were coming to pick it up, reworked the figure of her mother in ways that did not suit Morisot at all, but there was no time to undo the damage.  The painting was taken to the salon with Manet’s mangling (in Morisot’s mind) of it.  It was accepted and shown, but Morisot told her mother that she would rather be at the bottom of the Seine than show the work as her own.

Morisot -
Young woman at her window

The art historians who put together the show in San Francisco (and it will travel to Cleveland after that, so we in Ohio can see it in our neighborhood) made a case for Morisot communicating with Manet in a variety of other ways.  For instance, they maintain that her Young Woman at Her Window is a direct response to The Balcony.  She is saying, in effect, what would it be like if we were to look over a woman’s shoulder – to be curious about what she sees – rather than to look at her, and therefore to be focusing on what we see?  She is not just saying this about women, but also about men – much later she used the same approach to seeing what her husband saw when he was looking out the window.

It was at about this time that Morisot introduced Manet to painting en plein-air.  This was the style of working outside of the studio and catching changing conditions of light – something that Morisot went on to promote as a central figure in the impressionist movement.  She is the artist who showed in the most impressionist shows – more than Degas, Monet, or any of the other impressionists.  She also was central to this revolutionary movement in a way that Manet never was, even though his step into modernism was what allowed for the emergence of it.

Morisot - View of Paris from
the Trocadero

The historians went on to provide multiple examples of the ways that Morisot provided a template for Manet to follow – but I would like to focus on one.  In this example, Morisot’s View of Paris from the Trocadero (circa 1871-1872), includes a little girl with her back to us, presumably taking in the sights of Paris.  The art historians propose that Manet copied this device in The Railway (circa 1872-1873).  Though the other figures in the two paintings could not be more different.  The women in the View of Paris are impressions of people – and the woman facing us in The Railway is carefully rendered.  In fact, she is the same model as in Olympia, but the tenor of this painting is very different.

Manet- The Railway

I am here about to take significant license.  At the APsA conference, my research group was presenting information about the differences between in person psychanalyses and telehealth psychoanalyses.  We proposed that the zoom screen, or the telephone receiver mediates between the psychoanalyst and the patient (just as the air, but also the room that the analyst provides for an in-person meeting mediates the therapeutic relationship).  The goal of analysis, we proposed, is to have an unmediated experience – an experience of presence – with both the analyst (to feel present not just to the person, but to their mind) and for the patient to feel present with their own mind (to appreciate the functional elements of the mind that are usually available only through things like symptoms more directly – to feel things that they usually defend against).

So, I am going to try to have an unmediated experience of the Railway – to imagine my way into the mind of the artist.  He has presented us with a work of art – it is mediating between his mind and ours.  And if I draw on Wilfred Bion, an analyst who proposed that consciousness is finite and the unconscious is infinite, I will propose that my musings may have something to do with the infinite process that Manet was condensing – working and reworking to condense – in The Railway.  I am fully prepared to admit that it may actually have noting to with what was in Manet’s mind at the time, but it just might, so here goes…

The woman in The Railway is facing the viewer, but what she is displaying is a feeling that, to me, speaks of world weariness.  We cannot see the child’s face, but we can imagine that she is excited about the possibilities of life – that she may travel to places far away – that the world is an oyster waiting to be opened.  The woman in front of us has opened her oyster and found inside a book and a dog.  They are both on her lap.  They are the adventures that she has had – and they are much more circumscribed than the little girl imagines her adventures will be. 

I think it might be going to far to think that Manet is sympathetic to the plight of 19^th century women and the constraints that are placed on them.  Perhaps closer to home is the idea that he, himself, is more constrained than he would like in the ways that he sees and understands the world.  In two paintings painted near the end of his life, one by Morisot and one by himself, he paints Morisot’s daughter Julie in a classical pose atop a watering can in the family garden.  Morisot paints Julie playing with the watering can – using it as a prop in the game she is playing.  Despite his ability to move art forward to be “modern”, transitioning to engaging with the world more directly, to appreciate it in the moment, as Morisot does, he is still than creating a staged experience of it, the present still lies beyond his reach.  He still wants to manipulate objects rather than allowing himself, and us to be moved by them but also to play with them (I am aware that I am asserting this despite my having played with The Railway).

Perhaps my musings are influenced by my sense of Freud.  He, like Manet, was a brilliant man who imagined the mind in ways that others had not fully done before.  He is largely responsible (I think) for the sexual revolution and for our becoming a society that is much more accepting of the ways in which our animal roots play out in the ways that we construct ourselves and interact with each other.  Despite this knowledge, I don’t think he was able to transcend the limits that his own repressive background visited on him.   I guess I am proposing that the male gaze is a kind of prison that is very hard for even the greatest among us to work our way out of…

I must also confess that I prefer the work of Manet to that of Morisot.  Manet's painting was characterized by the curators as "overworked" while Morisot's is immediate.  I am in the minority in my family - the reluctant wife and mother - and by the mother's report, the father, all prefer Morisot.  I like the concrete - the care that Manet puts into creating a particular picture, that I can then imagine a world into over the less worked, more carefree characters that Morisot captures - or rather sketches - in the moment.

 

       

                                                                            Morisot -

In England (Eugene Manet on Isle of Wight), 1875

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