Kafka on the Shore in Read a book from each country

Jan 04, 2009 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: own, read2013, location-japan, audiobook, around-the-world

I went on a Murakami reading binge in 2009, and suddenly found myself hitting a wall. What I had started out loving started to overwhelm and suffocate me. I knew I needed a break from him for a while.

I did take a break from the break to read 1Q84, which I really enjoyed. As I listened to the audiobook of this novel, I found myself wishing I'd read this prior to 1Q84. Some of the themes are the same, and I don't just mean the silly themes like cats and pasta and music, but shifting realities and ...more

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Sep 17, 2011 J rated it liked it

Shelves: japanese-literature

Murakami is great at crafting this puzzling little spiritual world. His light touch works marvelously. The various planes of reality here brush up against each other so delicately instead of just trampling through each other. Best of all, he's able to use this whole spirit aspect to enhance the human characters, to show the small tragedies and sense of incompleteness which animate so much of what they do, instead of just having them trumped by it. Personally, I think I prefer Murakami's kooky ur ...more

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Aug 05, 2013 Duc rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Nakata's half dark shadow reminds me of the bear king in Golden compass. The Bear lost his purpose. They are both searching to find their own purpose again. The cat advised him to look for his own shadow instead of lost cats. For me, Nakata steals the show here. When I listen to the audio, I can really hear Nakata's voice. I keep wondering why Kafka has a slight British Accent the way he speaks in the audio version that I find distracting. 1Q84 Aomame voice is delightfully authentic because the Nakata's half dark shadow reminds me of the bear king in Golden compass. The Bear lost his purpose. They are both searching to find their own purpose again. The cat advised him to look for his own shadow instead of lost cats. For me, Nakata steals the show here. When I listen to the audio, I can really hear Nakata's voice. I keep wondering why Kafka has a slight British Accent the way he speaks in the audio version that I find distracting. 1Q84 Aomame voice is delightfully authentic because the voice is of a young Japanese woman. Not only is Nakata's voice on the audio sound better but I think that his character is rendered more roundly. The author and the reader has found a voice for Nakata. It's hard to say which character holds the fulcrum of the story. But Nakata seems more mysterious than any other characters I've meet in a story. He seems like a village idiot but has a wisdom that is beyond even the author's knowing. He almost seems god like. First with his ability to speak with cats and his ability to live mainly in the present. He can attain. His is a blank state which scares him because anyone can go in and have influence like Johnny Walker. But then later on we see that he has knowledge of the Entrance stone and knows about Mrs. Saeki from a long time ago. He and Mrs. Saeki both have something missing, both have half dark shadows that seems to suggest that they are both spirit beings, ghosts that have unsettle business her on earth. But we also see a hint of Nakata's power as he lends his cat speaking ability to Hoshino. The pairing of Hoshino and Nakata is the odd couple. Nakata is a pure and sexually innocent being while Hoshino is raging with sexual energy. This pairing makes sense and is a device to get Nakata to Mrs. Saeki and the entrance stone because Nakata is too 'dumb' to navigate the path to the stone in the physical world but not on the metaphysical spiritual realm. Mean while Hoshino is the bug that metamorphose. (After all, Kafka is in the background and to whom the author pays homage. Hosino is introduced late in the game but has one of the most dramatic changes in his life. He went from an ordinary truck driver to a cat speaking guardian of the saint and the stone.

Well having finished the audio version today, a few things about the book that I want to make a note of. Having just finish listening to 1Q84, a few related mentions, a seed or motif or theme which was mentioned in Kafka on the shore. He mentions at one point a gun enters the story and as Chekov said, once the gun enters a story it must be fired. Anther more important idea is that the will to live and the choice to end it. In 1Q84, the leader asked Aomame to end his life for him. In Kafka, Johnie Walker asks Nakata to kill him. Nakata is reluctant. He has to be provoked until he is out of his mind with rage, (because Johnny Walker was killing his beloved kittens in from of Nakata), to kill Johnny Walker. In 1Q84, Aomame kills The Leader with a special ice pick (Basic Instinct) that causes a painless death.

The spiritual theme is heavily influenced by Japanese culture, religion, and beliefs. It borrows ideas from "The Tales of Genji". In the Tales of Genji, a woman is jealous of another woman. She becomes a spirit that disturbs a woman until the woman becomes ill and the priest come to pry and light incense. The woman wakes up not knowing that her spirit and body was visiting the other woman and harassing her. She wakes up with the smell of incense smoke in her hair. That's when she realizes that her spirit was doing harm to others while she was asleep.

The work is high on concept. The idea is what is dream what is reality, what is identity and destiny? How brief encounters can really influence one another person and the exchange of abilities or personalities. For instance Hoshino gains Nakata's ability to speak with cats and forms a familiar bond with him. Popular commercial personalities such as Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders are borrowed as avatars.
“Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life. It's also a way of descending deep into my own consciousness. So while I see it as dreamlike, it's not fantasy. For me the dreamlike is very real.” -Murakami

There is a notion about the parallel universe of a different kind. Mentions of Labyrinth that Borges would be proud of. Labyrinth is the intestine. The Forrest is also a labyrinth. What is inside is also on the outside. Osima tells Kafka. (here, I need to find a quote to back up this idea.) I find from Wikipedia entry on Franz Kafka: "parent–child conflict, characters on a terrifying quest, labyrinths of bureaucracy, and mystical transformations." This describes Kafka on the Shore. It's as if this was the seed for the novel. No wonder the author won the Kafka prize. Also the whole book is a puzzle, a labyrinth.

The Greek of course had ideas about labyrinth. Also the Greeks had ideas about taboo subjects that was dramatized in Oedipus.

"Somewhere along the line Coltrane's soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it's McCoy Tyner's piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on thick, forbidding chords. Like some mythic scene, the music portrays somebody's - a nameless, faceless somebody's - dim past, all the details laid out as clearly as entrails being dragged out of the darkness. Or at least that's how it sounds to me. The patient, repeating music ever so slowly breaks apart the real, rearranging the pieces. It has a hypnotic, menacing smell, just like the forest." -Murakami
Here Murakami describes beautifully the music of John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" And the narrator sees entrails, labyrinth. Such minor details relate back to the over all theme of Labyrinth. And also, My Favorite Thing is from the Sound of Music that Kafka see on the T.V.
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Nov 25, 2007 Peggy rated it really liked it

One of those little mysteries. I had this book on my shelves, had rated it on these pages. But the spine kept nagging at me. So I pulled it from the shelves, opened it and began reading and discovered I had never read this. Perhaps I read an excerpt in the New Yorker. I honestly don't know and because this uncertainty fits so perfectly with the book itself, I will leave the mystery be.
So I began reading. I was engrossed, but reluctant to hurry through as I usually do with books. I slowed. I put ...more

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Nov 04, 2010 Jerzy rated it did not like it

Um ... magical realism can be great, but this was just a little too bizarre for me. Much of the oddness seemed pointless, and much of the plot was driven heavy-handedly: it felt like the characters had no drive of their own, and they did whatever they did only because the author wanted to write about it -- not because of any naturally-flowing course of events.

Maybe it's just the translation, but a few analogies sounded like they were meant to be awful:
"The clouds floating above the building were ...more

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Oct 18, 2011 Kristeen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audio-book-read

I hope whomever told me to read this will raise his or her hand. I think I wrote it down in my Palm Pilot, so it's been a few years ago. I'm very glad that I listened to this book instead of reading it. I'm not sure that I would have finished it because I would have kept going back to re-read passages and contemplate them. Instead I was kept marching along by the excellent narrator.

I like the author better than Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe, or Natsume Soseki, all of whom I read many years ago. ...more

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Sep 07, 2008 Coqueline rated it liked it · review of another edition

This is the third Murakami I read, and the one I find most disappointing out of the three. I have always prepared myself to suspense some beliefs reading Murakami, and as a matter of fact, his books are the only one materialising themselves as anime in my head. But this book is just taking the mickey in suspended belief department and crossed into the absurd, disjointed, with loose ends flailing around like tentacles in the end.

(view spoiler) ...more

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Jun 04, 2008 Stephanie A. Higa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: japan

I wasn't expecting to like this book at all, but wow. Murakami has an amazing imagination. I don't think I fully understand this book, which is why it seems a tad incomplete to me, but this is a lot more readable, enjoyable, satisfying, etc. than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Kafka sort of irritated me. I mean, he's fifteen, he's horny, I get it, but do we really need to read about every single erection and wet dream (or perhaps not "dream") he has? Well, that might be necessary to an extent, what ...more

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