Review: Kafka on the Shore

March 10, 2022

Today I finished Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. This is a long post.

This is quite possibly the most grotesque, perverted, and experimental book I have ever read, and may ever read, simply because there were times when I got so uncomfortable and so confused that I wanted to stop reading. The book required a good deal of effort to listen to, both physically and mentally, for reasons I will elaborate on later. To get this out of the way, I don’t recommend this book to anybody who is intensely morally again subjects like incest, animal mutilation, nonconsensual sex, very large age gaps, or any combination of these (I wonder how they’re related!). Though most of these things are used within metaphors or necessary turning points, they are all present or a recurring theme in the book, so I figured I would mention them. Naturally, I’m going to be mentioning some details of the book, but I don’t think it is anything that will ruin it, because I finished the entire thing and still don’t think I know what happened.

I tried writing a synopsis of the book, but I can’t. There is so much that goes on, and I found it impossible to even put the basic plot of this book into a paragraph because of how extremely dense it is with information. The best I can do is say that we follow the lives of two people, each with an incredibly well-used foil; a 15-year-old boy named Kafka, and an old man named Nakata. Kafka is scarred with no memory of his mother and sister and a wholly absent father, and Nakata suffers from complete memory loss from a paranormal incident that put him in a coma for three months when he was 9. The book, like most that use split perspectives, switches chapters between the two characters and seems to be cleverly put together so that when one plot is developing slowly, the other is at the top of its stride. It details the journey and maturation of both people, one who knows nothing of happiness, and another who knows nothing of suffering, which makes the book dynamic and never get especially boring, though it sort of dies off near the end when the characters’ paths converge. The chapters with Kafka are often somber and introspective, while the chapters with Nakata are whimsical and easygoing (at least, until the turning point of his character, the most stressful chapter I have listened to).

I thought the ending was satisfying, but I enjoy coming-of-age stories where people merely move on and accept what happened to them as an experience, rather than some neat story that can be replayed on screen and understood by everybody the same way. I like it because I think that this book will have a completely different meaning to everybody who reads it, more than your average introspective, metaphysical novel that is written with the sole purpose of making you go, “huh, that really makes you think.” This book has both style and substance, an interesting storyline crossed with the perplexity of the surrealistic and enough philosophical ideas to last a lifetime. Murakami said in an interview that the book contains several riddles, and that the riddles themselves are parts of the solutions, and that every solution will be different for every reader. This is exactly how it feels reading this book, like a huge riddle, with riddles contained inside it, and the inquisitive mind might spend hours trying to figure it out only to end up where it began; I often lost my place while listening to this, trying to connect details of the story to each other to solve these riddles.

This is what I mean by the book taking effort to get through (and this is where some spoilers lie). Not only do you have the joy of being described, in the second person, having consenting and nonconsensual sex with your (or who Kafka believes to be his) mother and sister in reality and in dreams (although in text, dreams and reality feel the same), as well as be described the process of murdering kittens within the aforementioned extremely stressful chapter, you also get the opportunity on every page to add a minor detail to the bank of minor details following the dozen mysteries that this book creates. All the while, the broadest philosophical quandaries are pelting you every chapter. It is a lot to think about and is obviously a book that not only suggests you read it more than once but practically demands it.

This book might frustrate a lot of people due to how many questions it opens and how few answers it gives, and to people who are easily uncomfortable with the gory details and dozens of mentions of genitals, I could see the book being interpreted as the fantasies of a pervert author. This might be true, but it’s too easy of a solution for me to accept given the context of the rest of the book. I would urge anybody who wants to read this to repress your instinctual objections and look for other interpretations, as I have seen many reviews online from strongly opinionated people focusing solely on a few grotesque scenes. There are 500+ pages of insane, surrealistic fiction and philosophy, surely you can find a more interesting interpretation than "Murakami is a pedophile and a freak." That got tangential, but I get upset when people completely miss the purpose of literature as a medium; this story could not exist and be sanctioned by any moral person in any other form, and all art deserves to exist. It's a product of culture, whether you like it or not.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, or at least the parts that were meant to be enjoyable. While I do think at times it gets way too drawn out with the introspection and might ask too much of the reader at certain points, the story is incredibly unique, the characters are well fleshed out, and like always, Murakami’s ability to pull you into the middle of a scene or feel like you know exactly who he is talking about within a couple of sentences is impressive. There were points I was in my car yelling as a plot point developed like I was at a homecoming football game, such as the major development in Kafka’s foil, Oshima. If he took a different approach to the philosophical themes and made them as compact while not missing any important details as he does in his qualitative descriptions, I think the book would be a lot more digestible while still making the reader think quite a bit. If you enjoy challenging novels, or things that make you question reality, or even just science fiction, this is something you should check out.