Plot Summary
A coming-of-age story that raises many questions about concepts such as good and evil, reality, time, and memory,Kafka on the Shore describes the journey of a fifteen year-old run-away, Kafka Tamura, from his home in Tokyo to the shores of Takamatsu. Kafka flees home because his father, a famous—but violent—sculptor, cursed him: he will kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister. Kafka’s mother fled with his older sister when Kafka was four years old.
Kafka takes refuge in a small private library outside Takamatsu, where he meets an understanding, supportive and intelligent transgender young gay man named Oshima. The enigmatic director of the library, Miss Saeki, may be his mother. A young woman whom he meets on the bus to Takamatsu, Sakura the hairdresser, may be his sister.
Each chapter narrated by Kafka alternates with a chapter about a mysterious older man named Nakata. As the novel progresses, Nakata’s life story and his separate journey to Takamatsu become entwined with Kafka’s.
The victim of a bizarre childhood accident that forever changed him, Nakata navigates the world in a simple-minded, organic fashion. As a result of his accident, he has no memories of the past or ability to form memories in the present. He cannot read or write. In exchange for his memory and intellect, the accident left him with the ability to talk to cats. Now an old man, Nakata supplements his disability income by finding local families’ lost pets. His search for one cat leads him to encounter great evil and sets him on a path to set the universe, which has gotten off track, back the way it should be. A young truck driver, Hoshino, is drawn into Nakata’s journey and helps him.
Nakata murders Kafka’s father—in the form of the cat-killer Johnnie Walker—and follows Kafka to Takamatsu, where he is guided by intuition to perform a series of magical deeds, involving opening and then closing the “entrance stone.”The entrance stone enables Kafka, and others, to pass from one world to another in order to gain insight and self-knowledge.
Both Kafka and Nakata flee as the police home in on the missing teenager and old man for questioning in the murder of Kafka’s father. Oshima takes Kafka to his family’s cabin in the woods to hide. Once there, he has a series of inexplicable encounters in the woods, and he must choose whether to succumb to the curse laid upon him or to move beyond it to a life of his own choosing. Nakata and Hoshino hide in an apartment on the outskirts of the city.
Though Kafka and Nakata never meet, Nakata’s actions allow Kafka to move into a future free of his father’s curse. Kafka chooses life, just as Nakata dies. Hoshino completes Nakata’s magical tasks,to honor Nakata’s memory. Kafka chooses to return to the world and decides to go home and face his future, which includes finishing school and dealing with the police and his inheritance, both literal and figurative, from his father.
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Chapter 1 Summary
Kafka packs for his journey, taking clothes, and several items from his father’s study, including his father’s cell phone, a picture of Kafka and his sister taken long ago at the beach, a five-inch long pocket knife, and a flashlight. He leaves home on the afternoon before his fifteenth birthday, which is Tuesday, May 21st. Kafka confesses that he has been preparing for something like this for a long time; for example, he has worked out to gain muscles so he looks older than he is. He believes that a prophetic voice or an “omen” (10) inside his head has foretold his leaving home. Kafka lives alone at home with his father; his mother and sister are gone, and he has no memory of what his mother looks like. He takes the night bus west from Tokyo and his home neighborhood in the Nakano ward, to Takamatsu.
Introduction
Kafka on the Shore (2005), Haruki Murakami's tenth novel, marks a slight departure from his previous work. While most of Murakami's protagonists are thirty-something men who favor isolation and have unremarkable histories with women, the main character in this novel is a fifteen-year-old runaway. For the most part, though, Kafka on the Shore is classic Murakami. The story is rich in references to music and Western culture, dreamy scenarios that expose the spooky underbelly of ordinary life, utterly unadorned language, and elements of magical realism that challenge the reader's grasp of reality.
Murakami's intention was to write a story about a boy who escapes his dangerous father and goes in search of his long-lost mother. The myth of Oedipus is thrown in along with a cast of supporting characters that includes an old man who talks to cats, a female hemophiliac who lives as a gay man, and two World War II soldiers trapped in time. The familiar themes of isolation, reality versus fantasy, and the connection between past and present are handled with Murakami's trademark humor.
THEMES
Oedipus
Haruki Murakami fashions one thread of Kafka on the Shore after the myth of Oedipus. In the Greek tragedy, Oedipus, son of Laius and Jocasta, was fated from birth to kill his father and marry his mother. Laius was fearful that the prophecy would come true, so sent his son to the wilderness to die. A servant took pity on young Oedipus, gave him to a shepherd who handed the child over to King Polybus and Queen Merope of Corinth. They raised Oedipus as their own. Years later, Oedipus quarrels with a man on a mountain road and kills him. The man turns out to be Laius. When Oedipus correctly answers a riddle posed by a mystical creature terrorizing the city of Thebes, he saves the city and is granted the hand of the widowed queen, Jocasta. Soon after, pollution and misfortune fall upon the city and the source of the curse is discovered. Jocasta commits suicide and Oedipus blinds himself.
Murakami alters the myth slightly, but its inclusion in the novel, as well as references and allusions to other Greek tragedies, makes the point that myths are touchstones for a variety of human experiences and the stories that explore them. In an interview at RandomHouse.com, Murakami explains, "Myths are the prototype for all stories…. Myths are like a reservoir containing every story there is." It becomes a device that allows Murakami to examine Kafka's emotions and the decisions he makes.
