Kafka on the Shore
In 2015, I was asked to write the programme notes for the Ninagawa Company’s theatrical production of Kafka on the Shore, an adaptation of the Haruki Murakami novel, when it played at the Barbican in London. The short essay that follows appeared in the programmes in London, New York and Singapore on the production’s tour.
Talking cats, transgender librarians, truck drivers and Colonel Sanders may not seem the most obvious ingredients for an international bestseller but Kafka on the Shore is no ordinary story and Haruki Murakami is no ordinary author.
Born in Kyoto, Japan in 1949, the only son of a pair of teachers, Murakami grew up during the American occupation and immersed himself in American culture; reading hard-boiled crime novels, listening to rock ’n’ roll and, eventually, becoming a jazz enthusiast.
He met his wife, Yoko, at university and they set up a jazz bar together, the Peter Cat. It was, by all accounts, a popular and successful venue but something happened to Murakami in 1978 that changed the course of his life. While sitting in the stands during a baseball match, his favourite team Yakult Swallows versus Hiroshima Carps, he was suddenly struck with the idea of writing a novel. ‘It was like a revelation, something out of the blue,’ he said later. On the way home he bought pens and paper and starting writing what was to become Hear the Wind Sing. It was published in 1979 and won the Gunzō newcomers award. The jazz bar owner had become a novelist.
The books that followed became popular with Japanese youth during the early 1980s, his use of twenty-something narrators and colloquial language made his writing instantly accessible to a generation that often felt shut out of the mannered, restrained world of literary fiction. But he found an even wider audience when he published Norwegian Wood in 1987, a more traditional love story or, at least, as traditional as Murakami is likely to get. It became a phenomenon in Japan, selling 3.5 million copies in the first year alone. Fans started dressing to match the book’s jackets (it came in two volumes: one red, the other green), a muzak cover version of the Beatles song went to #1 in the charts and there was even a Norwegian Wood air freshener on supermarket shelves.
Uncomfortable with this level of fame, Murakami left Japan to travel the world, eventually settling in America where he wrote the book most critics believe to be his masterpiece, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. It was certainly the novel that propelled him into the upper echelons of world literature — it became his first global bestseller — and as he himself said: ‘I’m sure that my importance as a novelist would have been greatly affected if this book hadn’t appeared.’
Kafka on the Shore was published almost a decade after The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by which time Murakami was back in Japan, and marked somewhat of a departure. Gone was the familiar narrator, replaced by a teenage boy, and half the book was written in the third person, a new approach for the author. It received a warm critical reception, both in Japan and abroad, and became another international bestseller.
The story is told through two parallel narratives. In the first, a teenage boy has run away from his father’s home to try to find his estranged mother and sister. We do not learn his real name but he calls himself Kafka, after his favourite writer. During his journey he frequently interacts with his alter ego, or imaginary friend, Crow. He ends up in a remote private library in Takamatsu, run by the mysterious Miss Saeki, and is permitted to stay. There he befriends Oshima, a transgender librarian. The two of them meet and discuss life and literature every day. It is, for Kafka, an idyllic existence until the police arrive, looking to question him about a violent crime.
The second narrative concerns Nakata, an elderly man considered slow and simple. As a child he was involved in a curious incident while on a school trip. His entire class was rendered unconscious following a bright flash of light in the sky. Nakata took longer to recover than his classmates and, when he did come round, had lost his memory but gained the ability to communicate with cats. Now, in his old age, he makes a small living by using his unusual talent to find lost cats in the neighbourhood. What better way to find a cat than by asking other cats? One such search takes Nakata, like Kafka, on a road trip that will change his life.
Through this off-kilter plot Murakami explores themes of identity — Oshima’s transgender character; is Miss Saeki Kafka’s long-lost mother?; are Kafka and Nakata facets of the same person? — and destiny, Kafka’s storyline owing more than a passing nod to the Oedipus myth. But the author himself has always deflected any analysis of his novels, they are to be enjoyed as pure stories with no need to read anything into them.
I interviewed Murakami prior to publication of Kafka on the Shore and asked him about the change of direction the book represented: ‘Most of my fiction up till now has been first person narratives dealing with a male protagonist (and narrator) in his twenties or thirties. A few years ago, however, I started taking a different direction and began writing in a different voice and perspective. There’s something about that style of writing that suits me. In any case, whenever I write a new novel I decide on a theme and attempt to do something new and different.’
However ‘new and different’ each novel may be, readers will be able to spot recurring themes and motifs across Murakami’s work. Cats appear in almost every book he writes, and play a particularly important role in Kafka on the Shore. Classical and jazz music provide the background score to many scenes. And then there is the otherworldly, the parallel universes, the sense that something is just a little out of whack with the world. Kafka on the Shore arguably represents the culmination of all these themes; it features all the elements of classic Murakami and yet does, as the author intended, offer us something truly new and different.
I once asked Murakami what he thought of adaptations of his novels: ‘I make it a rule not to see film and stage versions of my works. When I write a work, I’m already creating a movie or play in my mind and don’t feel like watching someone else’s new movie or stage version.’
Fortunately, we do not have to follow his example.
