Book Review: Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami

There's a great moment in Whit Stillman's comedy of manners, Barcelona. One of the American characters observes that it's easier to be in a relationship with a Spanish woman because any moments of offense or non-compatability are attributed to cultural differences rather than personality clashes.

Reading translated fiction is a little like that. When I like something, or when I don't understand it completely, I'm unsure of how much stems from the translator and how much comes from the work itself. A good chunk of my summer was spent reading Don Quixote, which I found entertaining and fundamentally lighthearted. At the end, reading Harold Bloom's essays about the book's sorrowful qualities, I couldn't tell whether my own opinion arose from the translation or from a view different from Bloom's.

My reaction to Kafka on the Shore was a little different. First thing's first: I loved it. It is strange in every way, entertaining at all times, and completely readable. The book alternates between the first-person narration of its protagonist, a fifteen-year-old runaway who names himself Kafka. Kafka Tamura is the son of a famous Tokyo sculptor. When he was four, his mother abandoned him, taking his sister with her. Kafka grows up tormented by recurring Oedipal prophecies.

He renames himself Kafka and runs away from Tokyo. Conversing with an alter-ego named Crow (which is apparently a rough translation of the word "Kafka") he finds himself fleeing to a small private library with a catalogue specializing in haiku. There, he befriends an androgynous recluse named Oshuma and finds himself attracted to the head librarian, Miss Saeki.

Alternating with Kafka's story is the odyssey of Nakata, written from the third person. The opening pages of Nakata's story provide one of the book's most absorbing passages, set during the American occupation of Japan and reading like a Japanese version of The X-Files. As an adult, Nakata is a sort of holy fool -- akin to a Forrest Gump, only with an ability to converse with cats.

Nakata's journey leads him to encounters with American marketing icons Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders. Kafka finds himself variously immersed in classical poetry, an aged pop song, a mystical forest, and a sexual obsession with two women.

The author, Haruki Murakami, has a serious cult following in the U.S. When I told a friend that I was about to start this book, he reacted the way I react when someone mentions The Hold Steady. But for such peculiar, brainy stuff, I found the book pretty accessible. While ocuppying similar errain, Murakami makes a much easier read than any of Thomas Pynchon's books. Don DeLillo's White Noise and End Zone came to mind, only with less pretension.

I like Kafka on the Shore more than any other novel I've read this year, but this enthusiasm comes with a significant reservation. The book ends with a series of quasi-mystical connections and encounters that do not always make sense. I'm tempted to attribute my moments of confusion to an ignorance of some sort of Eastern philosophy or uniquely Japanese themes. If this were a Western book, I suspect that I'd be less forgiving of the final fifty pages, where, it seems, things go a bit off the rails.

At other points, the book reminded me of Tom Robbins, whose novels I find entertaining but slight and forgettable. Is Nakata some sort of embodiment of a weak Japanese cultural memory and a country drawn to but tortured by Western products and pop culture? Do Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker instead give Nakata (and early 21st century Japan) a way of mediating some kind of national postwar pain? Or is this just slightly lazy brand-droppings, some sort of literary cheap trick from Murakami?

Reading the book in translation makes me a lot more forgiving. In much the way Barcelona's Ted and Fred took a generous view of Spain's women, I'm giving the book's possible weaknesses the best possible interpretation. Even if I weren't, I would have loved this book anyway. A couple years from now I'll probably think of Kafka on the Shore as my first Murakami.