Kafka on the Shore is My Favorite Murakami Novel

The following is an email I sent a friend regarding Kafka on the Shore.

I've had a week or two now to digest Kafka on the Shore and put some thoughts together. It's definitely my favorite Murakami novel thus far. By a long shot. The symbolism feels attainable, yet abstract enough that there's still room for reader interpretation. The plot is interesting enough to give weight to the characters, aided by the dual narrative between Kafka and Nakata/Hoshino. It's great.

A couple of ideas stand out to me:

The Oedipus prophecy set upon Kafka isn't necessarily that he literally needs to fulfill the Oedipus contract, but that he needs to carry on the spirit of his father's art. The subtext that I'm picking up is that his father (the cat-murdering, flute-blowing madman sculptor) sacrificed everything for his art, including his relationship with his son. The prophecy that he laid upon Kafka is his own desire for immortality, extending his name and art with Kafka as the vehicle. Thus Kafka feels overwhelming pressure and the impossibility of his own individuality, thus he runs away.

In Miss Saeki, Kafka finds a companion in grief. The two struggle with existing in the real world, caught instead between the threshold of life and death where her 15 year old spirit inhabits memories of the past. To her the past and present are inseparable, the youth that once drove her to compose Kafka on the Shore has long since vanished.

When Kafka ventures into the forest behind the cabin, he grapples with the idea of suicide. He's literally on the precipice of death, peering into the world beyond and the purgatory in-between. Here there's comfort in routine, at the cost of the literal music of life. Back home there's grief and sadness, but also the ability to form new memories shaped from the past.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes near the end of the book,

“Every one of us is losing something precious to us,” he says after the phone stops ringing. “Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads—at least that’s where I imagine it—there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.”