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

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

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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