Books
Fiction special - Teenage kicks. William Skidelsky finds that Haruki Murakami, revered by millions, has written a silly novel, obsessed with genitalia
Published 24 January 2005
Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami Translated by Philip Gabriel Harvill, 505pp, £12.99
ISBN 1843431106
Haruki Murakami is one of the world's most successful authors. Few other serious writers enjoy such commercial success: Norwegian Wood, the novel that made him famous, has sold more than a million copies. Only those who have never read his work are likely to be surprised by this. Murakami's writing, though often strange and complex, has an easygoing accessibility that makes his books hard to put down. The trademark elements of his fiction - a frank approach to sex, a preoccupation with alienation and loss, an effortless-seeming ability to straddle high and popular culture, a strain of overt surrealism - account for his popularity (especially, you suspect, among teenagers) both in Japan and in the west. In addition, Murakami himself is an attractive figure - vaguely mysterious and cultish, but also friendly-looking and cute. To any bookish 17-year-old, he must seem like the epitome of cool.
Is it possible, however, that Murakami is a bit too likeable? The flipside of such hipness is a suspicion that his novels are not terribly profound. It is true that they make frequent and extravagant gestures towards profundity - but that is not the same as actually being so. This suspicion is reinforced by a common misapprehension about his work. Because so much about Murakami's fiction appears reassuringly recognisable, it is tempting to assume that he is an author whose primary concern is real life. We feel the urge to identify with his protagonists, to see their concerns as mirroring our own. In fact, there is nothing remotely lifelike about his fiction: his imagination takes off from the point at which reality stops. For all their cleverness and surface complexity, his novels are essentially works of escapism.
The narrator of Murakami's latest novel is a characteristically precocious 15-year-old named Kafka Tamura. He is not really called Kafka: that is the name he adopts when, at the beginning of the story, he runs away from home. Kafka has lived alone in Tokyo with his father, a celebrated sculptor, ever since his mother left home (taking his older sister with her) when he was four. We never learn Kafka's real name, nor anything else about his home life, other than the terrible, Sophoclean prophecy his father has made - that after sleeping with both his mother and sister, he will commit patricide. Thus Murakami introduces one of his favourite themes - the conflict between destiny and individual volition. In absconding from home, is Kafka running away from or is he embracing his fate?
Kafka travels to the faraway town of Takamatsu, where he hopes he can disappear completely. As is invariably the case in Murakami, however, a series of strange coincidences occurs. On the coach, Kafka meets a girl who is the same age as his sister. Can she really be her? You would think not, but this being Murakami, nothing is ruled out. It is not long before she gives Kafka a hand job, thus taking care of the first part of his father's prophecy (sort of). In Takamatsu, Kafka visits a library and is befriended by the head librarian, an exquisitely cultivated transvestite called Oshima, but of greater interest is the library's mysterious and beautiful owner, Mrs Saeki. Besides being the right age to be Kafka's mother, Mrs Saeki is unable to account for a large part of her past. Kafka feels irresistibly drawn to her, particularly when he starts receiving nightly visits from her 15-year-old ghost. After losing his virginity to this accommodating apparition, Kafka embarks on an affair with the flesh-and-blood Mrs Saeki.
As if all that weren't strange enough, Murakami throws in a separate plot strand involving an old man called Nakata. As a child during the war, Nakata was involved in an incident of collective hypnosis in the woods. (Murakami documents this in the form of an X-file.) The episode left him mentally subnormal but with the ability to converse with cats. In Tokyo, Nakata runs into Kafka's father who, posing in the guise of Johnnie Walker (yes, I really do mean the man on the whisky bottle), is going about slaughtering the city's feline population. Outraged by this, Nakata kills Johnnie Walker and himself sets off for Takamatsu. Committing the murder causes Nakata to lose the ability to communicate with cats; he is, however, able to make fish fall from the sky. As becomes clear, his experiences are in some way bound up with Kafka's destiny - although, as this connection can be explained only by reference to an object called the "entrance stone", its nature remains tantalisingly hazy.
It would be conventional at this point to say that none of this is as silly as it sounds. Unfortunately, however, it is. Kafka on the Shore is an extraordinarily silly novel - and not just because of its specious metaphysical musings. No less ridiculous is Kafka's obsession with his genitalia. He is a boy who cannot take his clothes off without gazing lovingly at his "fresh-out-of-its-foreskin cock", or remarking on his "porcelain-hard erection". Not surprisingly, this habit only grows more pronounced when he begins his affair with Mrs Saeki. While there is nothing implausible about a 15-year-old being obsessed with sex, the way Murakami has Kafka talk about his penis makes it clear that what is really being expressed here is a middle-aged man's fixation with the idea of nascent sexuality.
Add to this the slow pace at which the story unfolds, and it is impossible to avoid concluding that Kafka on the Shore is a serious let-down. No doubt thousands will read it and believe they have discovered fundamental truths about life. One must hope that most of them will have the excuse of being teenagers.
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