Kafka on the Shore

by Haruki Murakami

“That’s right. Nakata’s the name. And you would be?” “I forget my name,” the cat said. “I had one, I know I did, but somewhere along the line I didn’t need it anymore. So it’s slipped my mind.” “I know. It’s easy to forget things you don’t need anymore. Nakata’s exactly the same way,” the man said, scratching his head. “So what you’re saying, Mr. Cat, is that you don’t belong to some family somewhere?” “A long time ago I did. But not anymore. Some families in the neighborhood give me food to eat now and then, but none of them own me.” Nakata nodded and was silent for a time, then said, “Would you mind very much, then, if I called you Otsuka?” “Otsuka?” the cat said, looking at him in surprise. “What are you talking about? Why do I have to be Otsuka?” “No special reason. The name just came to me. Nakata just picked one out of a hat. It makes things a lot easier for me if you have a name. That way somebody like me, who isn’t very bright, can organize things better. For instance, I can say, On this day of this month I spoke with the black cat Otsuka in a vacant lot in the 2-chome neighborhood. It helps me remember.” “Interesting,” the cat said. “Not that I totally follow you. Cats can get by without names. We go by smell, shape, things of this nature. As long as we know these things, there’re no worries for us.”

“Not to boast or anything, but I can’t write either,” the cat said, licking the pads of his right paw. “I’d say my mind is average, though, so I’ve never found it inconvenient.” “In the cat world that’s to be expected,” Nakata said. “But in the human world if you can’t read or write you’re considered dumb.

“What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow.”

My shadow looks weirdly long on the gravel.

I notice something dark on the front of my white T-shirt, shaped sort of like a huge butterfly with wings spread. I try brushing it away, but it won’t come off. I touch it and my hands come away all sticky. I need to calm down, so consciously taking my time I slowly take off both my shirts. Under the flickering fluorescent light I realize what this is—darkish blood that’s seeped into the fabric. The blood’s still fresh, wet, and there’s lots of it.

Nakata let his body relax, switched off his mind, allowing things to flow through him. This was natural for him, something he’d done ever since he was a child, without a second thought. Before long the borders of his consciousness fluttered around, just like the butterflies. Beyond these borders lay a dark abyss. Occasionally his consciousness would fly over the border and hover over that dizzying, black crevass. But Nakata wasn’t afraid of the darkness or how deep it was. And why should he be? That bottomless world of darkness, that weighty silence and chaos, was an old friend, a part of him already. Nakata understood this well. In that world there was no writing, no days of the week, no scary Governor, no opera, no BMWs. No scissors, no tall hats. On the other hand, there was also no delicious eel, no tasty bean-jam buns. Everything is there, but there are no parts. Since there are no parts, there’s no need to replace one thing with another. No need to remove anything, or add anything. You don’t have to think about difficult things, just let yourself soak it all in. For Nakata, nothing could be better.

“I can’t help it. Imagining something’s very important, so I thought I’d better tell you. It has nothing to do with whether you know or not.”

“If the composition’s imperfect, why would so many pianists try to master it?” “Good question,” Oshima says, and pauses as music fills in the silence. “I have no great explanation for it, but one thing I can say. Works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that very reason—or at least they appeal to certain types of people. Just like you’re attracted to Soseki’s The Miner. There’s something in it that draws you in, more than more fully realized novels like Kokoro or Sanshiro. You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart—or maybe we should say the work discovers you. Schubert’s Sonata in D Major is sort of the same thing.”

Nakata breathed quietly, shallowly, but he wasn’t afraid. He had a pretty good idea he was face-to-face with a hostile, aggressive animal. (Why this was, he had no idea.) But he didn’t carry this thought one step further and see himself in imminent peril. The concept of death was beyond his powers of imagination. And pain was something he wasn’t aware of until he actually felt it. As an abstract concept pain didn’t mean a thing. The upshot of this was he wasn’t afraid, even with this monstrous dog staring him down. He was merely perplexed.

I’m not the real Johnnie Walker, mind you. I have nothing to do with the British distilling company. I’ve just borrowed his appearance and name. A person’s got to have an appearance and name, am I right?”

Ignoring him, I close my eyes tight, zip the bag up to just below my nose, and clear my head. I don’t open my eyes for anything—not when I hear an owl hooting, not when something lands with a thud on the ground outside. Not even when I sense something moving inside the cabin. I’m being tested, I tell myself. Oshima spent a few days alone here too, when he was about my age. He must have been scared out of his wits, same as me. That’s what he meant by solitude comes in different varieties. Oshima knows exactly how I feel being here alone at night, because he’s gone through the same thing, and felt the same emotions. This thought helps me relax a little. I feel like I can trace the shadows of the past that linger here and imagine myself as a part of it. I take a deep breath, and I fall asleep before I know it.

It’s all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It’s just like Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there’s no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just like we see with Eichmann.

“All kinds of things are happening to me,” I begin. “Some I chose, some I didn’t. I don’t know how to tell one from the other anymore. What I mean is, it feels like everything’s been decided in advance—that I’m following a path somebody else has already mapped out for me. It doesn’t matter how much I think things over, how much effort I put into it. In fact, the harder I try, the more I lose my sense of who I am. It’s like my identity’s an orbit that I’ve strayed far away from, and that really hurts. But more than that, it scares me. Just thinking about it makes me flinch.”

without counterevidence to refute a theory, science would never progress.

Where does your responsibility begin here? Wiping away the nebula from your sight, you struggle to find where you really are. You’re trying to find the direction of the flow, struggling to hold on to the axis of time. But you can’t locate the borderline separating dream and reality. Or even the boundary between what’s real and what’s possible. All you’re sure of is that you’re in a delicate position. Delicate—and dangerous. You’re pulled along, a part of it, unable to pin down the principles of prophecy, or of logic. Like when a river overflows, washing over a town, all road signs have sunk beneath the waves. And all you can see are the anonymous roofs of the sunken houses.