Review : Kafka on the shore!

 #KafkaOnTheShore

-Haruki Murakami
The first thing I noticed when I held "Kafka on the shore" in my hands , was the brawny 600+ pages of paperback. It worked as a mild deterrent for a few days. Then one day I kicked that inertia off and started with the first page only to realise that it had infected my reasoning and judgement and I was no longer able to snub it.
Murakami has woven a dark and unfathomable web of mystique in Kafka' and you can never once break off from that metaphysical world of Kafka Tamura.
Kafka Tamura or his other self "The boy named crow" is a 15 year old runaway who wants to move away from his father's oedipal curse in which Kafka has to have a sexual relation with his mother and his sister!
Nakata is a slow and stupid sixty year old who can talk to cats and can make it rain! It's rather amusing to find how their lives are intertwined and held only by one thread : The Gateway to the other dimension!
The whole purpose of Nakatas life is to locate this gateway to a bizarre fourth dimension and hope that it will set everything that went wrong with his life as well as with this world ,right again. It sounds like a Crichton or Asimov sci-fi novel with a wormhole from which you could enter another universe by negotiating the space time continuum.
And yes it is somewhat like that!
But Murakami has introduced ghosts of living beings and projections of souls and a man who talked to cats and made mackerels and leeches rain from the sky ,for crying out loud, taking the narrative away from science.
He talks about a ghostly forest where Kafkas transgender colleague from the library ,Oshima, owns a hut. The forest is ruthless and gulps down whoever invades it and disrespects it. The forest is the main protagonist of the book and is the cause of Nakata being Nakata after a strange incident during the second world war.
Murakami as certain as he is about sexual fantasies, unfolds an atypical but sensual sexual escapade with Kafka and a 50 year old Miss Saeki who's the librarian in the library where Kafka works, thereby creating a leeway to ascertain his father's curse akin to a Greek tragedy.
Kafka , somehow, is able to penetrate the mystical forest and Nakata is able to locate the entrance to the metaphysical world and I found myself recollecting the climax scene from"Interstellar" or "2001:A space Odyssey" both of which talk about similar supernatural concepts beyond known science.
Murakami is a compelling story teller and his stories sometimes reek of rotting flesh , gushing blood , carnal pleasures , surrealism , fortitude , and mysticism.
He cleverly weaves Japanese folklore with Greek drama and demystifies the characters therein, like when Oshima says how easy life would be if there was chorus from the Greek plays guiding you with what next to do.
He also tells about hope and love and that love has no boundaries.
No wonder I was dreaming for days while I was finishing the book and sometimes I couldn't make out if I was living a dream apparently looking out for a totem to wake me up any time!
I did wake up though and I hated it !
---
Abhijit J
May be a black-and-white image of text that says 'ARACT MURAKAMI KAFKA ON THE SHORE'

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