"Kafka on the Shore": a hypnotic tale of cosmic quests

"Kafka on the Shore"
by Haruki Murakami
Knopf, 436 pp., $25.95

Cats, specifically, talking cats, play a significant role in Haruki Murakami's hypnotic new novel, "Kafka on the Shore."

One of Murakami's main characters, old Mr. Nakata, can speak with them. Early in the novel, Nakata is looking for a missing cat. The black tomcat he is conversing with hasn't seen the cat in question, but he does see something else: "Your problem is that your shadow is a bit — how should I put it? Faint."

Murakami's other protagonist, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura, is also in some psychic distress. He's running away from his Tokyo home, heading south, hoping to find his long-lost mother and sister and to escape his father's control.

It's a plan he has talked over with his buddy, Crow, a boy only he can see:

"On my fifteenth birthday I'll run away from home, journey to a far-off town, and live in a corner of a small library."

"Kafka on the Shore," the latest fiction from one of Japan's most original novelists, explores these two unusual spiritual journeys; two people at opposite stages of life who are propelled by urgent forces inside themselves that are unknowable. Gripped by these sensations, they have adventures in dreams and waking life that are beyond human logic. And along the way, each is befriended by an ally who accepts their strange destiny.

For Kafka, it is Oshima, the stylish librarian assistant, a young man who is really a woman. For Nakata, it's Hoshino, a good-natured truck driver who takes on Nakata's dubious quest as his own.

In a recent short story, "super-frog saves tokyo" (included in his 2002 collection titled "After the Quake"), Murakami played with this idea of a cosmic imperative in a mostly comic way. In that piece, a 6-foot-tall frog convinces a 5-foot-3 bank collections agent to help him save Tokyo by joining forces in a battle against a gigantic underground worm.

Here, in "Kafka," the tone is more sinister, romantic and elusive. Like the anime films of another great Japanese artist, Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away"), Murakami creates openings into alternate universes. Sardines and mackerel rain down from the skies; brand names like Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker walk the streets as living spirits. Erotic ghosts, or real women reliving past memories, come to you in waking dreams. Much of the time you really have no idea where Murakami is taking you, but you buy into the surrealism and odd mysterious beauty.

Nakata's story begins as a series of declassified secret military documents.

As a young child, Nakata suffered a baffling, debilitating experience. During World War II, while on a school outing, he and his whole class fell unconscious in a small clearing in the woods. Everyone regained consciousness except Nakata, who stayed in a coma for two weeks. When he awoke his memory was gone, his life up to that point "wiped clean."

Kafka also has a blank in his life. One week after he arrives in the city of Takamatsu, he wakes up in a woods near a Shinto shrine, his shirt covered in blood. Did he kill someone? He doesn't know.

"Kafka on the Shore" is an epic metaphysical mystery that is firmly grounded in a modern post-industrial Japan. But Kafka and Nakata follow visions that are from an older Japan, a world of animism and fate. It is this psychic tension between the ancient and the new that keeps us hooked into the dual narratives.

Each character goes about his detective work differently. Kafka's quest is essentially internal. His knowledge comes from literary discussions with Oshima, his romantic relationship with Miss Saeki, the head librarian, and his contemplation of a famous, haunting song she once wrote as a bereaved teenager.

Nakata's quest is action-driven. And although Kafka's character is written in the more intimate first-person, it is Nakata and Hoshino's exploits that drive the story and provide us with both wonder and entertainment. They make a terrific team, and Hoshino, in particular, is one of Murakami's best creations: A regular 21st-century guy with a samurai's heart.

Richard Wallace is a Seattle writer and the live theater coordinator for The Museum of Flight.