Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

Not a Nobel winner, but often proposed for the prize. After reading Remains of the Day, I suppose I picked this up next because it’s also a Japanese author, although unlike Ishiguro, Murakami actually lives in Japan and writes in Japanese. The book was recommended to me several years ago and I’ve had it sitting on my shelf. The novel tells two stories in alternating chapters that slowly overlap, although the protagonists in each story never actually meet.

In story one, Kafka Tamura, a 15-year old boy, runs away from home to escape an oppressive father.  His mother and an older sister left the family when he was a child and part of his quest is a search for them. His story and his wiser- than-his-years narration reminds me of Catcher in the Rye. His story also reminds me of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler both because Kafka ends up sleeping in a library (the kids in From the Mixed-up Files… hide out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and because the writing style is like a young adult novel. It’s not bad writing, just very simple and straightforward, which makes the book easy to read. (I read the translation by Philip Gabriel.) It’s also a page-turner, with a central mystery. You can’t wait to find out what happens next. Murakami reminds me of Paul Auster in his ability to tell a simply great story, and a great story simply.

The second story is the story of Satoru Nakata. Nakata is a 60-something year-old man, living on a government subsidy. As a young boy he was involved in a mysterious accident that left him mentally handicapped. He can’t read. But he can talk to cats.  Nakata’s story moves quickly into the supernatural.  He is enticed to murder an entity that has taken the form of the Johnnie Walker “walking man” logo.  Colonel Sanders also shows up later in the story.  Then after the murder Nakata begins his own journey leading eventually to the same city, and library, where Kafka has holed up.  

The supernatural incidents increase.  Unlike magical realism, the characters don’t just accept the fanciful events around them, they talk about them and offer philosophical and metaphysical explanations.  The dialogue is often one character asking a question and the other answering with a mini-lecture, about history, or philosophy, or classical music.  There’s a lot about characters moving between two worlds or having a foot in each world.  Kafka’s story has to do with memory and time.  But eventually nothing is really explained.  The stories resolve satisfactorily but Murakami’s intent seems less about the meaning of the story and more just about telling a good tale.  Like a dream, incident follows incident, it’s always interesting enough to keep going, and then you wake up.  But like a dream that lingers, I’m still partly in that world, partly in this.