Ann Arbor District Library: Book Club to Go Discussion Guide
http://www.aadl.org/catalog/record/1328061
About the Book
The unlikely alliance between
Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old
runaway, and the aging Nakata, a
man who has never recovered
from a wartime affliction, brings
dramatic changes to both
characters as they embark on a
surreal odyssey through a strange,
sometimes violent, sometimes
fantastical world.
With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki
Murakami gives us a novel every
bit as ambitious and expansive as
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which
has been acclaimed both here and
around the world for its uncommon
ambition and achievement, and
whose still-growing popularity
suggests that it will be read and
admired for decades to come.
Extravagant in its accomplishment,
Kafka on the Shore displays one of
the world's truly great storytellers
at the height of his powers.
About the Author Source:
http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~raytrace/lit/authors/h_murakami/#bio
Born in Kobe in 1949, Haruki Murakami studied Greek
drama before managing a jazz bar in Tokyo from 1974 to
1981. His third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, earned the
Noma Literary Award for New Writers and ended his career
at the jazz bar, and his next novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland
and the End of the World, won the prestigious Tanizaki
Prize. In 1996, Murakami received the Yomiuri Literary
Award for Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
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Reviews
The Observer
Haruki Murakami has often been described as a surrealist writer. But his latest
novel is less a search for truth in the imaginary than a Kafkaesque implosion of
truth.
Kafka on the Shore follows the journeys of two seemingly incongruous
characters: Kafka Tamura, a body-building, angst-ridden adolescent who
embarks on an Oedipal quest for self-knowledge, and Nakata, a prophetic old
man with a damaged brain, who is on an adventure he knows not where.
Murakami's mesmerizing narrative is an exploration of loss and recuperation. Yet
as the two stories interrupt each other, any progressive coming of truth is
disturbed. For Kafka, the fantasy of a middle-aged librarian fills the 'blank within
himself' (the mother who abandoned him).
Yet the more he strives to replace his loss, the more he experiences selfpunishment through the voice of his superego, Crow, who torments Kafka for
failing to achieve his goal.
For the 'halfwit' Nakata, who is not as dim as he seems, talking cats and fish
falling from the sky forms a part of everyday life. The world's enigmas are
acknowledged and accepted, and so the 'normal' and bizarre sit comfortably side
by side.
Kafka, however, is not content to leave the 'void of his life' unexplained. So he
constructs meanings and stories, which result in a division between reality and
fantasy (he hears voices in his head and is prone to violent outbursts).
Kafka's coming of age is the recognition that the truth of himself, his past, and
his love, is not something to be intellectualised, but respected as in part
unknown. Laden with philosophical overtones and enchanting wit, Murakami's
story is at once childishly magical and astoundingly wise. Just as the reader
learns not to force this book into coherent sense, so Kafka gains the selfrealisation that sometimes 'having no conclusion is just fine'.
The Washington Post
If bizarre things are happening in Japan, then there must be a new novel by
Haruki Murakami. America's favorite Japanese novelist could publish this
anonymously, and his fans would instantly recognize it as his. And for first-time
readers, Kafka on the Shore is an excellent demonstration of why he's deservedly
famous, both here and in his native land. He writes uncanny, philosophical,
postmodern fiction that's actually fun to read; he's a more serious Tom Robbins,
a less dense Thomas Pynchon. . . . It would be easy to make this novel sound
goofy: There are talking cats, sudden downpours of fish and leeches, a ghost that
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takes the form of Col. Sanders pimping in a back alley of Takamatsu, another
character who dresses up as the Johnnie Walker whiskey icon and collects the
souls of cats for a magic flute, a gorgeous prostitute who quotes Henri Bergson
and Hegel, and an "entrance stone" to another dimension. It would be just as
easy to make the novel sound ponderous: There are many discussions of Greek
tragedy, Plato's myth about the origin of the sexes, predestination, various
metaphysical systems, musicology, the nature of symbolism and metaphor, the
ways of Buddha and the Tao, and grim memories of atrocities committed during
World War II. The wonderful thing is the mash-up Murakami creates from this
disparate material, resulting in a novel that is intellectually profound but feels
"like an Indiana Jones movie or something," as one character aptly notes. Or
something. The novel consists of two parallel narratives told in alternating
chapters. One features a bright but unhappy 15-year-old boy named "Kafka"
Tamura -- he adopted the name partly because he likes his fiction but also
because "Kafka" is Czech for "crow," with whose solitary nature he identifies -who runs away from home because of an Oedipal foreboding that he will murder
his father and sleep with his mother. (His mother abandoned him at age 4, and
he hasn't seen her or his older sister since.) He leaves Tokyo for the southern
island of Shikoku and spends most of his time at a private library run by a 21year-old "hemophiliac of undetermined sex" named Oshima and a mysterious,
elegant woman named Miss Saeki, old enough to be his mother. Both of them
play key roles in helping the runaway find himself and come to terms with his
dark destiny. The other narrative deals with a retarded, illiterate man in his
sixties named Satoru Nakata, who as a child underwent an inexplicable
experience during World War II that erased his memory and stunted his
intellectual growth. In recompense for that loss, however, he has the ability to
communicate with cats and control the weather. . . . On one level, the novel is
about a 15-year-old boy's rite of passage into the adult world, but on a larger
level it's a meditation on Plato's notion (voiced in the "Symposium," as Oshima
explains to both Kafka and the reader) that each of us is looking for a soul mate
to complete us. Hoshino finds one in Nakata, who reminds him of a dim-witted
but devoted disciple of the Buddha, but who also fills in for a beloved
grandfather. Kafka finds one in Miss Saeki, who appears to him in dreams both
as the 15-year-old girl she once was and at her present age. And though Kafka
and Nakata never meet, their parallel actions complement each other on a
metaphysical plane.
Murakami's spin on this theme and the Oedipus myth is daringly original and
compulsively readable, enabled by Philip Gabriel's wonderfully fluent translation.
Kafka on the Shore is warmly recommended; read it to your cat.
Entertainment Weekly
Is there anything more boring than hearing about someone else's dream? And is
there anything more miraculous than having one of your own? The voluptuous
pleasure of Haruki Murakami's enthralling fictions — full of enigmatic imagery,
random nonsense, and profundities that may or may not hold up in the light of
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day — reminds me of dreaming. Like no other author I can think of, Murakami
captures the juxtapositions of the trivial and the momentous that characterize
dream life, those crazy incidents that seem so vivid in the moment and so blurry
and preposterous later on. His characters live humdrum lives, boiling pasta for
lunch, riding the bus, and blasting Prince while working out at the gym. Then
suddenly and matter-of-factly, they do something utterly nuts, like strike up a
conversation with a coquettish Siamese cat. Or maybe mackerel and sardines
begin to rain from the sky. In Murakami's world, these things make complete,
cockeyed sense.
Like many of Murakami's heroes, Kafka Tamura in Kafka on the Shore has more
rewarding relationships with literature and music than with people. (Murakami's
passion for music is infectious; nothing made me want to rush out and purchase
a Brahms CD until I read his Sputnik Sweetheart.) On his 15th birthday, Kafka
runs away from his Tokyo home for obscure reasons related to his famous
sculptor father. His choice of a destination is arbitrary. Or is it? ''Shikoku, I
decide. That's where I'll go....The more I look at the map — actually every time I
study it — the more I feel Shikoku tugging at me.''
On the island of Shikoku, Kafka makes himself a fixture at the local library, where
he settles into a comfortable sofa and starts reading The Arabian Nights: ''Like
the genie in the bottle they have this sort of vital, living sense of play, of freedom
that common sense can't keep bottled up.'' As in a David Lynch movie, all the
library staffers are philosophical eccentrics ready to advance the surreal
narrative. Oshima, the androgynous clerk, talks to Kafka about (inevitably) Kafka
and the merits of driving while listening to Schubert (''a dense, artistic kind of
imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some
utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might
want to close my eyes and die right there''). The tragically alluring head librarian,
Miss Saeki, once wrote a hit song called ''Kafka on the Shore'' — and may or may
not be Kafka's long-lost mother. Alarmingly, she also stars in his erotic fantasies.
In alternating chapters, Murakami records the even odder antics of Nakata, a
simpleminded cat catcher who spends his days chatting with tabbies in a vacant
Tokyo lot. One afternoon, a menacing dog leads him to the home of a sadistic cat
killer who goes by the name Johnnie Walker. Walker ends up dead by the end of
the encounter; back in Shikoku, Kafka unaccountably finds himself drenched in
blood. Soon, Nakata too begins feeling an inexplicable pull toward the island.
If this plot sounds totally demented, trust me, it gets even weirder than that.
Like a dream, you just have to be there. And, like a dream, what this dazzling
novel means — or whether it means anything at all — we may never know.
Onion A.V. Club
Donning his full wispy beard and Southern-gent regalia, Colonel Sanders appears
as a pimp and seer in Haruki Murakami's beguiling new novel Kafka On The
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Shore, but beyond a mild curiosity, no one really bats an eye. In the Murakami
universe, such abnormalities become so commonplace that they're treated
matter-of-factly, as individual puzzle pieces that fit into the grand design.
Somehow, Murakami makes sense of the free-floating surrealistic elements that
coalesce into his dreamlike narratives, but anyone explaining his novels to the
uninitiated risks looking like a babbling idiot. The tale of two vaguely connected
journeys to uncertain destinations, Kafka drifts along on an atmosphere pregnant
with mysteries large and small, but Murakami never feels inclined to explain
them all away; he's confident that their offbeat associations can sustain interest
over the long haul.
Literary Criticism
Murakami's Kafka on the Shore: everything in life is metaphor
The principal protagonist of Kafka on the Shore is a young man who calls himself
Kafka Tamura. On the eve of his fifteenth birthday, he leaves his home and
travels alone by overnight bus to Shikoku, the southern island he had long
determined to visit. His departure is motivated by a desire to evade this
prediction of his father: that someday he would kill his father with his own hands
and sleep with his mother--and with his older sister. Kafka's mother had in fact
disappeared when he was four years old, abandoning her son but taking with her
his sister who was six years his senior. Kafka had never seen a photograph of his
mother, and in fact did not even know her name.
On his own now and guided apparently by some imperceptible workings of fate,
Kafka reaches Shikoku and comes to a private library, where he takes up
residence. The owner is a Miss Saiki, a beauty of character and particular
elegance in her early forties whose life has been marked by tumult and mystery.
Even though Kafka suspects she may be his mother, at no point does Miss Saiki
do anything either to confirm or deny his suspicions. Kafka falls in love with her,
and their relationship is physically consummated.
The even-numbered chapters of the novel develop another story line in parallel
with Kafka's, featuring an old man named Nakata who had, while a primaryschool student during World War II, experienced with classmates a quite
incomprehensible collective loss of consciousness, from which he emerged to find
he had entirely lost his memory. Not only was he unable to recover any of the
knowledge he had acquired, he also could no longer read, or even count. On the
other hand, he now had the unusual ability to converse with cats. At one point,
Nakata loses control of his faculties and kills a madman who goes by the name
Johnny Walker, after which he also makes his circuitous way to Shikoku, where
the young Kafka Tamura is living. At this point, the two stories that had been
developing in parallel acquire an on-again, off-again relationship that it turns out
fate has predestined, and when they do converge, they do so around the person
of Miss Saiki. In addition to these major characters just described, others,
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including Sakura, Oshima, Hoshino, Colonel Sanders, Oshima's big brother Sada
and a number of cats to whom Nakata has given names, are assigned roles of
metaphorical import in this work.
Kafka on the Shore comprises a total of 49 chapters, although if one adds the
interludes entitled "The Boy Named Crow" that appear in Books 1 and 2, they
amount to 50. The odd-numbered chapters for the most part use realism,
dreamscapes and metaphor to tell the tale of the young Kafka Tamura and his
abandonment of the paternal home as he is about to turn fifteen. The evennumbered chapters, meanwhile, in keeping with the erratic parallelism of the
separate stories, draw on illusion, surrealism and fatalism to portray the many
odd encounters that mark the life of old Mr. Nakata. The alternation of these two
approaches endows the work with rich inventiveness, fantastic cunning and
interplay of opposites in what amounts to a modern fable and an exploration of
irony.
Dreams seem to be endowed with metaphorical meaning, as the author uses the
dream state to link reality with surrealism, and this world with its opposite. The
"spirit projection" nature of the dream state is also used to fill the otherwise
impassible chasm between world and underworld (71).
There are two principal spiritual sources discernible for Kafka on the Shore. One
is the classical Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex and its allusions to the ironies of fate
(210). The other is Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), which provides the
"vengeful spirits" of the living who set out to do others harm (71), as well as the
ghosts, spirits and other supernatural phenomena informing Murakami's creative
technique. In the interplay of these artifacts of ancient Western and Eastern
cultures in the deepest strata of consciousness, the young Kafka Tamura
becomes the object of a curse just like the ancient Oedipus, and in the dream
state, each of the curse-like predictions of his father is fulfilled, one by one. The
novel shows an expert hand in mounting deceptions and building suspense; the
story abounds in unexpected twists, and the plot develops with terse
concentration and an irresistible appeal that drives readers to absorb the whole in
a single sitting. Indeed, the reader relishes Murakami's unique logical language,
the clear shaping of his characters, and the mystery, modernity and symbolism
built into the novel's architecture.
Like the author's earlier work Norwegian Wood (1987), Kafka on the Shore is also
the title of a song featured in the book:
You sit at the edge of the world
I am in a crater that's no more.
Words without letters
Standing in the shadow of the door.
The drowning girl's fingers
Search for the entrance stone, and more.
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Lifting the hem of her azure dress,
She gazes-at Kafka on the shore. (238)
Neither the title of the book, the name of the song, nor indeed the lyrics are
particularly difficult to understand, though they are clearly symbolic and even
have a certain surrealistic flavor. They are strongly metaphorical in nature. In
addition, considering that the noun kafka in Czech means "crow," if this meaning
is attached to the young protagonist Kafka Tamura and to the titles of the book
and the song, and associated with the interludes entitled "The Boy Named Crow,"
the whole work can be viewed at all three levels as replete with metaphor. In
fact, whether Kafka Tamura can become the "world's toughest 15-year old" in a
world in which all is metaphor, or whether he can obtain redemption through his
father's curse-like prophecy, is no longer very important. What is important is
whether he can draw from the mockeries of fate the wherewithal to invest
himself with greater breadth and depth. It is as Oshima says in the book:
Sometimes [it's a hopeless situation]. But irony deepens a person,
helps them mature. It's the entrance to salvation on a higher plane,
to a place where you can find a more universal kind of hope. That's
why people enjoy reading Greek tragedies even now, why they're
considered prototypical classics. I'm repeating myself, but
everything in life is metaphor. People don't usually kill their
father and sleep with their mother, right? In other words, we
accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that
we grow and become deeper human beings. (210)
As Kafka on the Shore reminds us so often that "everything in life is metaphor,"
we are brought to revisit the bygone flavors of all the fiction that came before
Haruki Murakami's, and to experience the complex interweaving effect of all
indeed being metaphor. Reading this new novel leads me once again to hear in
Murakami the music of the wind, yet grasp of it not a trace.
Source: Lai, Chen-nan. "Murakami's Kafka on the Shore: everything in life is
metaphor." Fu Jen Studies: literature & linguistics 39 (2005): 131. Literature
Resource Center. http://www.aadl.org/research/browse/books
Discussion Questions Source:
http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/offthepage/guide.htm?command=Search&db=/c
atalog/main.txt&eqisbndata=0099458322
1. The Oedipus myth is a central motif in the novel. How does this act as a
catalyst to main events in the narrative? And how is it a precursor to the
emergence of other themes such as incest, loss and running away?
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2. Kafka on the Shore displays characteristics of many familiar strands of fiction,
from sci-fi to romance; fairy tale to mystery; teenage rights-of-passage novel to
philosophy. How would you categorise Kafka on the Shore in terms of genre, and
why?
3. Murakami's novels are known for their many and diverse references to
Western brands and culture (from Ray-Ban and Nike to Freud and Beethoven).
But Kafka on the Shore is the first time that he has taken the step to introduced
such brand names as characters in their own right, in the guises of Johnnie
Walker and Colonel Sanders. What do you think Murakami is trying to say about
21st Century culture through this fictionalised use of brand names?
4. Is this a novel about identity? The reader is deliberately left in doubt as to the
'true' identities of many of the characters. How do you think this facilitates the
narrative/forwards the plot?
5. Murakami's novels are rooted both in western and in eastern culture. In Kafka
on the Shore we have the western register of classical and popular music, Greek
mythology, the writings of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats (visible in Kafka's narrative)
and the eastern register of Shinto shrines, holy stones and living ghosts (seen
primarily in Nakata's narrative). In what way do you think these vivid cultural
references inform the reader's understanding of the story and events?
6. For both Kafka and Nakata, this is a journey of self-discovery. As Kafka is
planning to run away, the Boy Named Crow tells him: 'When you come out of the
storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what the storm's all
about.' (p.4) What do you think Kafka and Nakata are really looking for? Do you
think that either of them succeeds in their quest?
7. "You're afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the
responsibility that begins in dreams." Oshima tells Kafka on p.195. What are the
roles played by dreams and imagination in this story?
Multimedia
Murakami Offers A Runaway’s Tale In Latest Novel (Radio Braodcast)
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4491163
Kafka on the Shore, the new novel by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, has the
tale of a Huck Finn-like runaway who leaves Tokyo and heads toward the
provinces in search of his destiny. From NPR’s All Things Considered.
Further Reading
Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
http://www.aadl.org/catalog/record/1174867
(Call number: Fiction Murakami)
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The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love
(once and for all, despite everything that transpires afterward) with a classmate
whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal
commitments--until she meets a considerably older and far more sophisticated
businesswoman. It is through this wormhole that she enters Murakami's surreal
yet humane universe, to which she serves as guide both for us and for her
frustrated suitor, now a teacher.
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
http://www.aadl.org/catalog/record/1049665
(Call number: Fiction Murakami)
It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a
postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance
company's advertisement. What he doesn't realize is that included in the pastoral
scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has
unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing
ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and
elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the
remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the
mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within
himself.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
http://www.aadl.org/catalog/record/1213993
(Call number: Fiction Murakami)
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's
missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld
that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada
encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a
malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl;
and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous
things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A memoir by Haruki
Murakami
http://www.aadl.org/catalog/record/1315133
(Call number: 895.635 Mu)
In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Murakami began
running to keep fit. A year later, he'd completed a solo course from Athens to
Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a
dozen critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had
on his life and--even more important--on his writing.
Author’s official website
http://www.murakami.ch/main_2.html
Information and resources on the author.
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Read-Alikes
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
http://www.aadl.org/catalog/record/1026934
(Call number: Fiction Marquez)
A seminal work in Latin American history and literature traces a family's tradition
of power and domination.
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
http://www.aadl.org/catalog/record/1058351
(Call number: Fiction Rushdie)
A hijacked jumbo jet blows apart high above the English Channel. Two figures,
Gibreel and Saladin, are washed up on an English beach. Soon curious changes
occur -Gibreel seems to have acquired a halo, while Saladin grows hooves and
bumps at his temples.
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
http://www.aadl.org/catalog/record/1076563
(Call number: Fiction Yoshimoto)
A lyrical tale about loss and grief and familial love. When college student Mikage
Sakurai is orphaned by the death of her grandmother, she is rescued from
loneliness and grief by Yuichi, a young flower shop delivery man, and discovers
that families come in many shapes . . . and can be found in many places.
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
http://www.aadl.org/catalog/record/1005752
(Call number: Fiction Allende)
Here is patriarch Esteban, whose wild desires and political machinations are
tempered only by his love for his ethereal wife, Clara, a woman touched by an
otherworldly hand. Their daughter, Blanca, whose forbidden love for a man
Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates her father, yet will produce his greatest
joy: his granddaughter Alba, a beautiful, ambitious girl who will lead the family
and their country into a revolutionary future. The House of the Spirits is an
enthralling saga that spans decades and lives, twining the personal and the
political into an epic novel of love, magic, and fate.
Summaries from AADL.org Catalog
Extra!
Throughout the book there is an ongoing theme tied to the classic Oedipus Rex.
How do members of the group feel about the usage of the Greek Tragedy?
Discuss.
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