Kafka on the Shore

by Haruki Murakami

Hill Incident, 1944 Document Number:

sauntered

Along with the pain there’s a feeling of closeness, like for once in my life the world’s treating me fairly. I feel elated, as if

want to cut off Goma’s head, but you don’t want that to happen. Our two missions, our two interests, conflict. That happens a lot in the world. So I’ll tell you what—we’ll negotiate. What I mean is, if you do something for me, I’ll return the favor and give you Goma safe and sound.”

Rumors flew that she’d been committed to a mental hospital after a failed suicide attempt in the deep forests surrounding

Mount Fuji. Others said a friend of a friend

got all

His best known work was his major “Labyrinth” series, which explored, through an uninhibited expression of the imagination, the beauty and inspiration found in the meandering contours of labyrinths.

That’s why people enjoy reading Greek tragedies even now, why they’re considered prototypical classics. I’m repeating myself, but everything in life is metaphor.

want to listen to ‘Kafka on the Shore.’ Can you get hold of the record?”

While they’re still alive, people can become ghosts.

The Tale of Genji, for instance, is filled with living spirits. In the Heian period—or at least in its psychological realm—on occasion people could become living spirits and travel through space to carry out whatever desires they had. Have you read Genji?”

‘The Chrysanthemum Pledge,’ in Tales of Moonlight and Rain. Have you

You sit at the edge of the world, I am in a crater that’s no more. Words without letters Standing in the shadow of the door. The moon shines down on a sleeping lizard,

Little fish rain down from the sky. Outside the window there are soldiers, steeling themselves to die. (Refrain) Kafka sits in a chair by the shore, Thinking of the pendulum that moves the world, it seems. When your heart is closed, The shadow of the unmoving Sphinx, Becomes a knife that pierces your dreams. The drowning girl’s fingers Search for the entrance stone, and more. Lifting the hem of

her azure dress,

She gazes— at Kafka on the shore.

“Entrance stone?”

“From time immemorial, symbolism and poetry have been inseparable. Like a pirate and his rum.”

Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly’s wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.”

I feel like I’m gazing at some table of random numbers, just following the words with my eyes.

‘Abbreviating Sensory Processing of Continuous

Information,’

antisocial romance that colors my warped, homosexual, Gender-Identity-Disordered life?”

The kind of fallen-from-grace sort of building you find in any city, the kind Charles Dickens could spend ten pages describing.

“That’s right. I have to get the other half of my shadow back.”

“Johnnie Walker went inside Nakata. He made me do things I didn’t want to. Johnnie Walker used me, but I didn’t have the strength to fight it. Because I don’t have anything inside me.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined civilization as when people build fences.

The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself.”

“Nobody’s going to help me. At least no one has up till now. So I have to make it on my own. I have to get stronger—like a stray crow. That’s why I gave myself the name Kafka. That’s what Kafka means in Czech, you know—crow.”

“The strength I’m looking for isn’t the kind where you win or lose. I’m not after a wall that’ll repel power coming from outside. What I want is the kind of strength to be able to absorb that outside power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things—unfairness, misfortune, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.”

The old man’s path and yours are bound to cross.”

Taking crazy things seriously is—a serious waste of time.”

It’s a labyrinth.

“It was the ancient Mesopotamians. They pulled out animal intestines—sometimes human intestines, I expect—and used the shape to predict the future. They admired the complex shape of intestines. So the prototype for labyrinths is, in a word, guts. Which means that the principle for the labyrinth is inside you. And that correlates to the labyrinth outside.”

“Chance is a scary thing, isn’t it?” Hoshino said. “It certainly is,”

Nakata agreed.

No matter how much I try, I wind up at a dead end in the maze. What

Coltrane’s labyrinthine solo plays on in my ears, never ending.

bit of shape and form has disappeared from the world, increasing the amount of nothingness.”

Cops, Hoshino concluded, not for the first time in his life, are

just gangsters who get paid by the state.

Chunichi Dragons

Guts. Oshima told me once that intestines are a metaphor for a labyrinth.

bright red sweat suit and a black silk hat was sitting

made this flute out of the souls of cats I’ve collected. Cut out the souls of cats while they were still alive and made them into this flute. I felt

“The world is a metaphor, Kafka Tamura,” he says into my ear. “But for you and me this library alone is no metaphor. It’s always just this library. I want to make sure we understand that.”

You were in this huge house that was like a maze,