A Wild Cat Chase

Habitues of as well as newcomers to Haruki Murakami8217;s universe must pick up Kafka on the Shore with a fair bit of preparation. Old-time...

Habitues of as well as newcomers to Haruki Murakami8217;s universe must pick up Kafka on the Shore with a fair bit of preparation. Old-timers, fortified with all the dislocations experienced in Murakami8217;s previous novels like A Wild Sheep Chase, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Sputnik Sweetheart, will sight patches of familiar turf. But they will have to dig deep into those older works to guage his drift into more fantastical realms. Newcomers, possibly unacquainted with Murakami8217;s interest in alternate realities and paranormal trysts with fate, may perhaps leave the book with a fresher, more literal reading.

Both categories could, however, benefit from clues left by Murakami8217;s characters. Explaining the appeal of Schubert8217;s sonatas to the 8220;Kafka8221; of the title, a very Murakamian side-character 8212; content in his eccentricity and possession of a very urban, very hip sensibility in rural Japan 8212; says: 8220;I have no great explanation for it, but one thing I can say: works that have a certain imperfection in them have an appeal for that very reason 8212; or at least they appeal to certain types of people. You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart 8212; or maybe we should say that the work discovers you8230; That8217;s why I like listening to Schubert while I8217;m driving. As I said, it8217;s because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I8217;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 8212; that a certain type of perfection can only be realised through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.8221;

There you have Murakami8217;s literary manifesto: mindful exploration of imperfections in quest of wholeness. It is a theme he made robustly salient with his first work of non-fiction, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. In 1995 Aum Shinrikyo cultists released sarin gas in the Tokyo underground. Murakami tracked down an array of people nudged out of their former lives by the attack, survivors who made drastic life choices the very next day. For them, in a way the terror attack opened up a wormhole into another, desired way of being.

Murakami has been hailed as Japan8217;s leading contemporary novelist. But he has also set purists aflutter with his disregard for the templates and sensibilities of the old masters. In his fiction Japanese exceptionalism mingles easily with the sounds and concerns of Anywhere Suburbia. In a very Japanese way, the dreamworld is intimately connected with the waking life. Global brandnames become markers in the way characters assemble their lives, inevitably to the soundtrack of western rock and jazz and background readings of the Beat poets and European masters. Local geography accommodates turn-of-the-century global sameness. Little incidents can be trapdoors to past lives, one8217;s own as well as another8217;s.

In Kafka on the Shore, for instance, that past lies 8212; as almost always 8212; in World War II Japan. Sixteen students go into the countryside foraging for mushrooms to augment their meagre war-time rations, and are felled into unconsciousness for a few hours, possibly by a UFO. All recover, only with memory of that incident completely missing, except one. And we meet him as he enters old age. Satoru Nakata, once a brilliant student, cannot read or write but he can converse with cats. He supplements a subsidy for the disabled with the kindnesses of cat-owners who seek his help in tracing lost pets. In a twist bristling with sinister foreshadowings, Nakata chances upon a sinister, brazen man who goes around killing cats, and using their souls to make a flute. Nakata must decide, should he kill this man or allow him to keep murdering the animals.

And who is this man? Is he connected to the main character, Kafka? Kafka, at 15, has just run away from home, in a bid to escape predictions that he will inflict great harm to his family members 8212; and to thereby honour destiny8217;s demands. In earlier books, Murakami8217;s characters sometimes disappeared, they went to the other side. In Kafka on the Shore, characters split into different states of being. Kafka meets with ghosts of others, as well his sub-self. Nakata is possessed of only half a shadow.

This is not Murakami8217;s best novel, not by a long shot. It doesn8217;t have the dizzying spin of Sputnik Sweetheart, or the brashness of A Wild Sheep Chase. But it is definitely his most unsettling work. It will leave you edgy about prospects of having been discovered.