Kafka on the Shore

by Haruki Murakami

The boy named Crow lets out a sigh, then rests a fingertip on each of his closed eyelids and speaks to me from the darkness within.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

“My cell phone number,” she says with a wry expression. “I’m staying at my friend’s place for a while, but if you ever feel like seeing somebody, give me a call. We can go out for a bite or whatever. Don’t be a stranger, okay? ‘Even chance meetings’ . . . how does the rest of that go?” “‘Are the result of karma.’” “Right, right,” she says. “But what does it mean?” “That things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.”

“According to Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, in the ancient world of myth there were three types of people,” Oshima says.

“In ancient times people weren’t just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.”

I have on a clean white Ralph Lauren polo shirt, chinos, and a pair of brand-new Topsiders.

I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here—me included—will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away.

What am I always so tense about? Why this desperate struggle just to survive?

In the Penal Colony,’” Oshima says. “I love that story. Only Kafka could have written that.”

The Arabian Nights.

The Tale of Genji

“Because playing Schubert’s piano sonatas well is one of the hardest things in the world. Especially this, the Sonata in D Major. It’s a tough piece to master. Some pianists can play one or maybe two of the movements perfectly, but if you listen to all four movements as a unified whole, no one has ever nailed it. A lot of famous pianists have tried to rise to the challenge, but it’s like there’s always something missing. There’s never one where you can say, Yes! He’s got it! Do you know why?”

“That’s why I like to listen to Schubert while I’m driving. Like I said, it’s because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I’m driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of—that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging. Do you know what I’m getting at?”

“You can appreciate Schubert if you train yourself. I was the same way when I first listened to him—it bored me silly. It’s only natural for someone your age. In time you’ll appreciate it. People soon get tired of things that aren’t boring, but not of what is boring. Go figure. For me, I might have the leisure to be bored, but not to grow tired of something. Most people can’t distinguish between the two.”

Back inside the hut, I dry off with a towel, sit down on the bed, and look at my penis—a light-colored, healthy, youthful penis. The head still stings a little from the rain. For a long while I stare at this strange organ that, most of the time, has a mind of its own and contemplates thoughts not shared by my brain.

But that calm won’t last long, you know. It’s like beasts that never tire, tracking you everywhere you go. They come out at you deep in the forest. They’re tough, relentless, merciless, untiring, and they never give up. You might control yourself now, and not masturbate, but they’ll get you in the end, as a wet dream. You might dream about raping your sister, your mother. It’s not something you can control. It’s a power beyond you—and all you can do is accept it. You’re afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you’re awake you can suppress imagination. But you can’t suppress dreams.

“From my own experience, when someone is trying very hard to get something, they don’t. And when they’re running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them. I’m generalizing, of course.”

“The Greek tragedy. Cassandra was the princess of Troy who prophesied. She was a temple priestess, and Apollo gave her the power to predict fate. In return he tried to force her to sleep with him, but she refused and he put a curse on her. Greek gods are more mythological than religious figures. By that I mean they have the same character flaws humans do. They fly off the handle, get horny, jealous, forgetful. You name it.”

“The curse Apollo laid on her was that all her prophecies would be true, but nobody would ever believe them. On top of that, her prophecies would all be unlucky ones—predictions of betrayals, accidents, deaths, the country falling into ruin. That sort of thing. People not only didn’t believe her, they began to despise her. If you haven’t read them yet, I really recommend the plays by Euripides or Aeschylus. They show a lot of the essential problems we struggle with even today. In koros.”

“Right. What Aristophanes said. How we stumble through our lives desperately fumbling for our other half. Miss Saeki and that young man never had to do that. They were born with their other half right there in front of them.”

“As you can see,” Oshima says, “we’re a very small library. And unfortunately we don’t have the space for separate restrooms. Naturally it would be better to have separate facilities, but none of our patrons have ever complained. For better or for worse, our library doesn’t get very crowded. If you’d like to pursue this issue of separate restrooms further, I suggest you go to the Boeing headquarters in Seattle and address the issue of restrooms on 747s. A 747’s much bigger than our little library, and much more crowded. As far as I’m aware, all restrooms on passenger jets are shared by men and women.”

Oshima picks up her business card again, runs his eyes over it, then lays it back down on the counter. “Ms. Soga,” he begins, “when they called the role in school your name would have come before Ms. Tanaka, and after Ms. Sekine. Did you file a complaint about that? Did you object, asking them to reverse the order? Does G get angry because it follows F in the alphabet? Does page 68 in a book start a revolution just because it follows 67?”

“Actually what I’m doing is shifting the analogy,” Oshima says. “One of the most effective methods of argument, according to Aristotle. The citizens of ancient Athens enjoyed using this kind of intellectual trick very much. It’s a shame, though, that at the time women weren’t included in the definition of ‘citizen.’”

“How could any woman of generous spirit behave otherwise, given the torments that I face,” Oshima says. The two women stand there as silent as icebergs. “Electra, by Sophocles.

As if by mutual consent, all the people were well dressed—ties, shiny briefcases, and high heels, everyone rushing off in the same direction. For the life of him Nakata couldn’t understand what so many people like this could possibly be up to.

“Are there any capitalist cats?” Nakata asked. Hagita burst out laughing. “Boy, you are different, Mr. Nakata! But I like your style. Capitalist cats! That’s a good one. A very unique opinion you have there.”

“Listen, Kafka. What you’re experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn’t choose fate. Fate chooses man. That’s the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy—according to Aristotle—comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist’s weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I’m getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results.”

Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was totally covered in darkness. The physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two. They were directly linked. Like this.”

“Tales of Moonlight and Rain

“My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime.”

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”

“Henri Bergson,” she replied, licking the semen from the tip of his penis. “Mame mo memelay.”

“Why are you so nice to me?” “What are you, a dunce?” “What do you mean?” “’Cause I like you—can’t you figure that out?

“A line from Ueda Akinari’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain. I doubt you’ve read it.”

“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time. It’s just a natural feeling. You’re not the person who discovered that feeling, so don’t go trying to patent it, okay?”

Words have all died in the hollow of time, piling up soundlessly at the dark bottom of a volcanic lake.

spouting off,”

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.”

“There are a lot of things that aren’t your fault. Or mine, either. Not the fault of prophecies, or curses, or DNA, or absurdity. Not the fault of Structuralism or the Third Industrial Revolution. We all die and disappear, but that’s because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss. Our lives are just shadows of that guiding principle. Say the wind blows. It can be a strong, violent wind or a gentle breeze. But eventually every kind of wind dies out and disappears. Wind doesn’t have form. It’s just a movement of air. You should listen carefully, and then you’ll understand the metaphor.”

“What is a man of property?” “A rich person.” “What’s the difference between the two?” Hoshino tilted his head in thought. “I don’t know. Seems to me a man of property’s more cultured than just a regular rich guy.” “Cultured?” “Anybody who has money is rich. You or me, as long as we had money, we’d be rich. But becoming a man of property isn’t so easy. It takes time.”

Believing that art itself, and the proper expression of emotions, was the most sublime thing in the world, he thought political power and wealth served only one purpose: to make art possible.

A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.”

Why do people wage war? Why do hundreds of thousands, even millions of people group together and try to annihilate each other? Do people start wars out of anger? Or fear? Or are anger and fear just two aspects of the same spirit?

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

François Truffaut’s