Kafka at sea

Haruki Murakami's latest book, Kafka on the Shore, makes for compelling reading.

Running to over 500 pages, the novel alternates the stories of Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old boy running away from a seemingly mad father (of whom we only catch tantalising, unnerving glimpses throughout the novel), and Mr Nakata, a 60-year-old man who has been left illiterate (albeit extraordinarily amiable and able to talk to cats) by a childhood incident involving what seems to be a UFO, mass hypnosis and a highly strung schoolteacher.

Given all this, it should not be unexpected for the reader, when starting out, to feel she is picking her way through an impenetrable fog.

Much is cleared up near the end, however, when the parallel stories join together, but even then loose ends remain, and, as David Mitchell puts it in his review for the Guardian, "For Murakami devotees, this fantasy's loose ends will tantalise; to his admirers, they may invite flummoxed interpretation; but for the unconvinced, they will just dangle, rather ropily."

The novel begins when Kafka runs away from his Tokyo home to the southern Japanese island of Shikoku.

He is drawn to a private library in a town called Takamatsu and befriends the librarian, a transgendered young haemophiliac named Oshima, who, as the novel progresses, turns into something of a Greek chorus""he helps Kafka along, but as far as the novel goes this seems to be his only role.

Meanwhile, Kafka's father is brutally murdered in Tokyo, and the police are looking to question him and a doddery old man, who has the ability to predict mackerel showers, in connection to the crime.

The doddery old man of course is Nakata, who has killed the famous sculptor (who is posing, for reasons that never become entirely clear, as the Johnnie Walker on whisky labels) in the culmination of a series of bizarre events involving talking dogs, universal flutes, and much massacring of cats.

After this cryptic murder, Nakata is infused with a certain immovable purpose, which leads him on a pilgrimage, also to Shikoku, and introduces him to Hoshino, a truck driver and probably the most engaging character in the novel.

Murakami uses the labyrinthine plot to explore what it means to be a thinking, acting individual, where human responsibilities begin, and how they change with various situations, for example, in war.

Moreover, he plays with the idea that it is not just what one does, what one intends to do is equally important, whether or not this is seen through to actual action.

Actions, in the end, seem to have little consequence in the characters' lives, compared with what strength one's intentions can have, what one's dreams can achieve, and what one's memories can destroy.

While Kafka's father is being killed, Kafka loses consciousness and awakes to find himself covered with blood. Given this, and the Oedipal curse on him, he cannot but draw the obvious conclusion: he has killed his father.

This seems to be confirmed when he comes across something Oshima has written (in his role, no doubt, as the Greek chorus) in a book about the trial of a Nazi officer: "It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just as Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibility."

Soon Kafka finds that this is only the beginning: not only is it possible to be responsible for an act you have no memory of committing, you can have memories of people and scenes you have never been part of, and your desires can become so strong that they can take on a life of their own.

There are references here to Kafka's The Trial, to Japanese literature in The Tales of Genji, and to Shinto spirituality.

There is also a strong theme of Greek tragedy throughout the novel; apart from the Oedipal curse, the presence of an almost authentic Greek chorus, and a hero who cannot escape his fate, there is the appearance of a very unlikely deus ex machina in the guise of Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken, here as a pimp, who leads Hoshino to the true goal of Nataka's pilgrimage (after softening him up with a Hegel-quoting prostitute).

The passages involving Nakata and Hoshino are by far the easiest to read in this novel""if there is one criticism to be made, it would have to be that Kafka, always given to navel-gazing, and becoming more philosophical with every page, begins to sound positively soupy by the end ("I'm all alone in the middle of a dim maze. Listen to the wind, Oshima told me. I listen, but no wind's blowing..." and suchlike)""although this is probably an unfair criticism of a child who has clearly been through so much, who is living with the burden of not just his own disturbed life but of different lives and loves through the times, and spends much of the last part of the book in limbo between life and death.

It is a relief when, in the end, the whole burden of the story rests on the shoulders of the uncomplicated Hoshino, and becomes a clear-cut battle between good and evil.

It is the one thing that we can be sure of in the entire novel, where the lines between fantasy and reality are the least blurred""and the fact that one of the participants in this battle is a long, thick, squidgy worm, should tell you exactly how blurred fantasy and reality is in this novel.

In the end, although much is left to resolve itself, we feel that perhaps it was part of Murakami's intention to leave much of the plot to the imagination of the reader, to change the plot as she wills.

And despite the fact that in places, the novel is about as clear as the inside of a cow, it is difficult to put down, and even after reading will stay in your mind for days.

Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami
(translated by Philip Gabriel)
Harvill
Price: £6.60;
Pages: 505