Kafka on the Shore

by Haruki Murakami

The driver laughed. “You’re a strange one, aren’t you.” “People tell me that sometimes.” “I happen to like the strange ones,” the driver said. “People who look normal and live a normal life—they’re the ones you have to watch out for.”

“Which leaves us with the fact that strange, inexplicable events are happening one after the other. Maybe it’s just a series of coincidences, but it still bothers me. There’s something about it I can’t shake.”

“Someday you will murder your father and be with your mother, he said.”

He didn’t make any friends. None of this bothered him, though. Being left alone meant he could be lost in his own little world.

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.

You’ve never ever in your life envied anybody else, or ever wanted to be someone else—but right now you do. You want more than anything to be that boy. Even knowing that at age twenty he was going to be smashed over the head with an iron pipe and beaten to death, you’d still trade places with him. You’d do it, to be able to love Miss Saeki for those five years. And to have her love you with all her heart. To hold her as much as you want, to make love to her over and over. To let your fingers run over every single part of her body, and let her do the same to you. And after you die, your love will become a story etched forever in her heart. Every single night she’ll love you in her memory.

“Is it possible that Miss Saeki . . . is my mother?”

“I felt like if I stayed there I’d be damaged beyond repair,” I say.

“As long as there’s such a thing as time, everybody’s damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.” “But even if that happens, you’ve got to have a place you can retrace your steps to.” “A place you can retrace your steps to?” “A place that’s worth coming back to.”

“When I was fifteen,” Miss Saeki says with a smile, “all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place beyond the flow of time.”

moonlight shines down on the trees in the garden. There are just too many coincidences. Everything seems to be speeding up, rushing toward one destination.

Not the most appealing-looking city, he decided, but it felt pretty good to be walking around wherever he wanted in a place he’d never been before.

“But maybe you won’t get to sleep that easily?” Colonel Sanders said knowingly. “When a person’s looking for something and can’t find it, they usually can’t sleep very well.”

“It’s written all over your face. By nature you’re an honest person. Everything you’re thinking is written all over your face. It’s like one side of a split-open dried mackerel—everything inside your head’s laid out for all to see.”

“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.” “I’m sorry?” “Matter and Memory. You ever read it?”

“At the same time that ‘I’ am the content of a relation, ‘I’ am also that which does the relating.”

volitionally

dingbat?

“A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that observes to reason that acts. That’s what’s critical.

But I think where a person is born and dies is very important. You can’t choose where you’re born, but where you die you can—to some degree.”

“Perhaps I did. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Whether you come to a place to live or to die, the things you do every day are about the same.”

“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?”

His first-ever visit to a library had made him painfully aware of how little he knew. The amount of things he didn’t know about the world was infinite. The infinite, by definition, has no limits, and thinking about it gave him a mild migraine.

How nice it would be, he thought, to be able to talk with each and every cat in there. There must be all kinds of cats in the world, all with different ways of thinking and talking. Would foreign cats speak in foreign languages? he wondered. But this was another difficult subject, and again his head began to throb.

“Yeah, but if you look at it like that we’re all pretty much empty, don’t you think? You eat, take a dump, do your crummy job for your lousy pay, and get laid occasionally, if you’re lucky. What else is there? Still, you know, interesting things do happen in life—like with us now. I’m not sure why. My grandpa used to say that things never work out like you think they will, but that’s what makes life interesting, and that makes sense. If the Chunichi Dragons won every single game, who’d ever watch baseball?”

He made me feel like I should try and make something of myself. He made me feel—I don’t know—connected.

But I wasn’t normal, so that’s why I’m the Nakata I am today. It’s too late to do it over. I understand that. But still, even for a short time, I’d like to be a normal Nakata. Up until now there was never anything in particular I wanted to do. I always did what people told me as best I could. Maybe that just became a habit. But now I want to go back to being normal. I want to be a Nakata with his own ideas, his own meaning.”

“I’m scared. As I told you, I’m completely empty. Do you know what it means to be completely empty?”

There’s no way you can leave here. You aren’t free. But is that what you really want? To be free?

“That backpack’s like your symbol of freedom,” he comments. “Guess so,” I say. “Having an object that symbolizes freedom might make a person happier than actually getting the freedom it represents.”

“Perhaps,” Oshima says, as if fed up. “Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real bind. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free.”

“Including you?” “Yeah. I prefer being unfree, too. Up to a point. Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined civilization as when people build fences. A very perceptive observation. And it’s true—all civilization is the product of a fenced-in lack of freedom. The Australian Aborigines are the exception, though. They managed to maintain a fenceless civilization until the seventeenth century. They’re dyed-in-the-wool free. They go where they want, when they want, doing what they want. Their lives are a literal journey. Walkabout is a perfect metaphor for their lives. When the English came and built fences to pen in their cattle, the Aborigines couldn’t fathom it. And, ignorant to the end of the principle at work, they were classified as dangerous and antisocial and were driven away, to the outback. So I want you to be careful. 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.”

Life’s crappy, no matter how you cut it. He just hadn’t understood that when he was little.

He used to go to the river every day to catch fish. Nothing to worry about back then, he reminisced. Just live each day as it came. As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the line it all changed. Living turned me into nothing. Weird . . . People are born in order to live, right? But the longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve lost what’s inside me—and ended up empty. And I bet the longer I live, the emptier, the more worthless, I’ll become. Something’s wrong with this picture. Life isn’t supposed to turn out like this! Isn’t it possible to shift direction, to change where I’m headed? “Excuse

“A very wise conclusion. There’s that saying, ‘Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all.’”

You might not be able to read, but there are things only you can do. That’s what you gotta focus on—your strengths. Like being able to talk with the stone.”

Oshima once used the term hollow men. Well, that’s exactly what I’ve become. There’s a void inside me, a blank that’s slowly expanding, devouring what’s left of who I am. I can hear it happening. I’m totally lost, my identity dying. There’s no direction where I am, no sky, no ground.

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”

“Nakata’s lived a long time, but as I said, I don’t have any memories. So this ‘suffering’ you talked about I don’t rightly understand. But what I think is—no matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.”

Surfing’s a more profound kind of sport than it looks. When you surf you learn not to fight the power of nature, even if it gets violent.”

“That was part of it,” he says. “I don’t know, I don’t feel right unless I’ve got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel’s always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even. Where were you born?”

“Every one of us is losing something precious to us,” he says after the phone stops ringing. “Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads—at least that’s where I imagine it—there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.”

Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there—to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there.