Today, I finished reading 'Kafka On The Shore' by Murakami. It was my second Murakami book, the first one being Men Without Women. I am not very good at writing book reviews using specialised words, so instead, I would write like I am telling a friend what the book is like.
Well, the novel is dreamlike. You say what do you mean by dreamlike? It is like a dream. You see many things in a dream that are not ordinary. That is, when viewed from an awakened state, things look absurd. You see past and present intertwined; characters and events don't respect space-time. You may remember a dream of something akin to you attending a wedding, but all the people were from your school, and maybe the location was your college, and people were probably wearing sportswear. But when you were in that dream, it didn't look like things were out of the ordinary. There is something similar in the novel. Fishes and leeches rain from the sky; time freezes, and a man can talk to a cat or stone. A boy named Crow accompanies the protagonist, but you don't quite know who he is. Or is he a boy or a crow? Is he a shadow of Kafka or his subconscious or what?
The book is spread across about 600 pages. It is divided into more than 40 chapters, which alternate between two parallel stories. Interesting coincidences make you feel these two parallel stories are the same and connected. The story is an intersection of history, fiction and myth. There are rich references to music. There is an underworld. There is a ghost. Boundaries between real people and ghosts, dream and reality, get blurred. A man makes flutes out of cat souls. He aims to make some big, huge flute of cat souls. But why?
Sometimes, you feel that everything is predestined and hopelessly progressing towards the inevitable, as if an object were falling into a black hole. Yet, other times, you see characters defying what was supposed to be unavoidable (or do they?).
What I make out of this book is not something I can not tell very well. The book might provoke you to ask some questions. When we read stories in primary school, they are supposed to have a moral lesson or something. But when you see the real world, is it supposed to be in the format of primary school stories where you have a conclusion and a lesson at the end of the book? Whatever happened at the end may have been the conclusion, but what does it mean? Isn't an attempt to derive meaning from all events our invention? What is the meaning of a flower blooming or a bird singing? What moral lessons or life lessons do they teach? They don't. It is us who may do mental gymnastics to find out a meaning. There are characters you love, maybe one you may hate about many others whom you don't even understand, let alone love or hate.
If you are someone who has been reading for some time, I would recommend it to you. Well, I am not quite sure if a long novel of magical realism is something a beginner might want to start from. If you want to get some taste of what the book might be like, I recommend reading some short stories from Murakami's book 'Men Without Women'. Overall, Kafka On The Shore is a fantastic book which makes you think and wonder.
~Anurag