That “parallel world” is also present in books and the arts in general. One thing which can be noted in Kafka on the Shore is the successful and reasonable incorporation of art elements which are like the food for the young Kafka’s spirit.
Thus, there is hardly a better word to describe the appeal of Haruki Murakami’s works than cleanliness. Kafka Tamura of Kafka on the Shore is a neat character from his actions to his thoughts, which is not a surprise. None of Murakami’s characters are messy, not even when they are bored, in a state of panic, in the utter loneliness, or even in sexual abandon that they all experience.
This is only but half the picture. What is more important is that the writing style of Haruki Murakami perfectly matches that cleanliness. Those who believe that writing of Murakami is simple, that it becomes repetitive and cannot get out of it, seem to have erred grievously. Murakami is the type of writer who understands his work very well, and has accepted to follow a very difficult path, the greatest manifestation of the combination of talent and labor: only an extraordinary practice of writing can make a person realize that he can follow a path that at first glance looks similar to others, even ready to be considered mediocre literature, at least not high-class, but in fact knows how to tread very precisely in the middle of a thin path between a strange place, at once a rich forest and a dry desert, a place made up of all the literary and literal clichés that words have ever created in the world.
I think there is another definition of a writer: an individual who employs all the objects that other people employ but cannot discern the kitsch and the void in them (void – a Murakami’s leitmotif seen also in Kafka on the Shore where characters Kafka and Oshima read T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” – p. 207). An attempt to avoid stereotype is the sign of a great writer and many attempts to avoid it are the result of hard, long and continuous work.
The opening of South of the Border, West of the Sun is both very orthodox and very unorthodox (“I was born on the fourth of January, 1951. The first week of the first month of the first year of the second half of the twentieth century”) is a good example: following an introduction that could not appeal to the classical reader more, the reader is left anticipating a classical novel, but that is not what is delivered. And traces of that escape appear elsewhere: It is interesting to pay attention to the Bildungsroman (a narrative type that tells about a character from the birth to the age and all the stages of the life, all the relations) which the characters discuss in Kafka on the Shore. It is like a gentle laugh from the writer, echoing behind me: I have stepped over the line but as to how I do not know.
This is not crucial and indeed Murakami does not look back. One cannot turn back, just like Kafka Tamura was forbidden to turn his head and look at the world which is half way between two worlds, half open, half closed, hidden behind the so called entrance stone. All this needs an understanding. In this case, Murakami’s writing will continue to be situated on the side of the border between the real and the dream-like. This is something that not every person can comprehend because Murakami’s novels (maybe only novels, short stories are different, they are like a sketch, and sketches do not require observing the barriers that should be transgressed). This is rather peculiar, there are only a handful of people who can pull this off. Kafka did not do it, Proust even less, but Romain Gary or Paul Auster can do it.
Looking at Murakami’s entire novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is as slim as Kafka on the Shore. It is rather interesting that Kafka on the Shore is much better than the previous novel in terms of its concept. Although it is a bit of a stretch to call it a version, there are similarities between the two works: Both parts are organized in parallel fashion and almost have no connection between them while both parts contain history, and both parts have a war-related section. However, Kafka on the Shore has grown to a point where the second story line can parallel the first one with no clear break with the main plot concerning Kafka Tamura. Doing so is quite tiresome and also demands a longer inspiration, which is the main rationale for why the reader is compelled to read through the entire novel at once or wither through each segment of several dozen pages.
Kafka Tamura, “the most resilient fifteen-year-old in the world,” leaves his home in Tokyo and accidentally (is it really accidental?) arrives in Takamatsu, meets Sakura on the way, and arrives in the Komura Memorial Library with two people who have for different reasons turned away from life: the pretty Miss Saeki and Oshima who is a homosexual and has many profound thoughts. To Miss Saeki, Kafka says: “It doesn’t matter where you go. You have to get out of there, or you’re finished, you know it. ” (p. 330) To this, Miss Saeki replies, “In life, unbelievable things happen. ” (p. 331) Indeed, many unbelievable things happen to Kafka as well as to the characters in the second story line, focused on old man Nakata. All of this results in the world’s incompleteness, the distortion of time, and all the things that people in fact have to live with, but notice very little. There is also only a very small group of people who participate in solving that warping and all the other people in this world are in the dark, they are excluded. Something is definitely not quite right with this world. This is where Kafka becomes a part of all the predestined misfortunes of his own, even if he somewhat anticipates them, it is of no use. The presence of Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders of the KFC fried chicken chain in the second story line is also like a gentle reminder of another source of the world’s instability, this time, physical.
The biggest surprise that awaits Kafka is probably loneliness, which Oshima briefly explains before taking the boy to the mountains: There are various kinds of solitude: three or seven; get ready for the kind you least expect it. p. 130 There are shocks grounded on something unforeseen; again Oshima, What you are experiencing is the leitmotiv of many tragedies of the Greeks: people do not choose their destiny; destiny chooses them. p. 227 The world is cruel, ironic, and life’s tragedy actually derives from the decent values of the principal An individual is pulled into tragedy not because of their flaws but because of the positive vices of existence.
Such situation is vividly depicted in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Thus, Oedipus is brought into tragedy not due to his inactive and ignorant characters but because of his courage and commitment to speak the truth. ” (p. 227). Thus, Aleinnivan’s DREAM, Kafka’s dreamlike situations, and even the murder of his father are linked, are produced, are the responsibility to a certain extent, and help introduce a small portion of the gloom that pervades the WHOLE.
The protagonist of Kafka on the Shore is Kafka, but the most effective interpreter is Oshima, who at one point anticipates and interprets Kafka’s departure from the world: “I am speaking of a world which lies close to our own, but to which we have no access and which is protected from our inquisition by a high partition. There is a switch, however, and we can open it carefully and step through into the other world but we can never go back, and if we try to retrace our steps we shall never be able to find the gap which we made in the partition. ” (p. Here we are lost in labyrinths, the spiritual, psychological one and the physical one.
It is possible to recognize that “parallel world” is also in books and, in the main, in art In this context, it would be pertinent to mention that one of the Kafka on the Shore’s merits is the rather reasonable incorporation of the artistic components that at an artistic level can be compared to the food, essential for the young Kafka. At the most concentrated level is Miss Saeki’s song, but also the Komura Memorial Library (Italo Calvino once said that writing is a challenge to the labyrinth), and in the books that Kafka read: The Castle, The Trail, The Metamorphosis of Kafka (this time it shall be the writer not the boy), the book about the Nazi Jewish butcher Adolf Eichmann and the battles of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Then there is The Thousand and One Nights which is the most famous one and Cassandra which belongs to the mythology, for it tells the story about the unfortunate Cassandra who has the power to predict only the misfortunes but no one hears her. Lastly, there are the oldest known novel The Tale of Genji and the books of Natsume Soseki a famous Japanese writer of the late XIX and the beginning of the XX centuries. The appearance of The Tale of Genji (by Murasaki Shikibu, where the spirits are both a supernatural phenomenon and a natural form of the human spirit within them) and Natsume Soseki is like a small reconciliation of Murakami with Japanese culture because the main characters of the previous novels are far more comparable to Scott Fitzgerald.
But beware: it is not seen as it has been told many times: Indeed, this is the case of Chapter 12 where a teacher, this time of a Yamanashi elementary school, admits that the many stories of students collapsing and having to faint during the war including Nakata is an unadulterated falsehood. As much as we critique our world, one cannot be certain that the parallel world that cannot be seen is flawless either. In part, death is just the streak of inadequacy. Accepting imperfection is perhaps the only possible solution, as Oshima once told Kafka on the way up the mountain, referring to Schubert’s sonata in D major: “If it is artistically dense, it shocks the mind, keeps it awake: If I hear a perfectly beautiful piece of music executed in the very acme of perfection while driving – it upset, I may want to close my eyes to die.” But for me the D major piece contains the dimension of other-impossibility which is something of perfection achieved only through the infinity of the imperfection. Well, personally I think that is very encouraging. ” (p. 128)