Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies
3:2 (2005), 93-96
REVIEW
Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, Kafka on
the Shore, Alfred A. Knopf, distributed by Random House, New York, 2005,
436pp. ISBN 1-4000-4366-2.
IN THE UNUSUAL or extraordinary, if it is to be at all human, there must also be the
mundane. Even in the most extraordinary times, I will still find time to do the
everyday – not because I’m a pervasively plain person, but just because we are all
live in repetition. Today I drink a cup of coffee, I look at the front page of the New
Zealand Herald (also checking the daily misnomers and mistakes column), and
tomorrow, in all likelihood, I will do the same, and, if I don’t, there are always other
daily duties to perform. It is the bones of our life and it is the bones of Japanese
writer Haruki Murakami’s narrative cannon.
With Murakami waiting down the page, however, let me chose a more
particular activity; something empty, casual and common. My recurrently mundane
activity is drinking a beer at my kitchen table, or not even my kitchen table, a kitchen
table. You do not have to have consumed a beer at a kitchen table to follow me and,
if you have ever read a book by Haruki Murakami you will recognize this moment; it
is highly likely you’re an expert at it. Drinking this beer can be done alone or with
company. Your thoughts clarify, cold, transparent and sharp; just like your beverage.
Nothing I do, as I drink my beer, will change the quality of what I am doing,
because always in some way, sip to sip, I am repeating myself. I could be drinking
any beer in any country, any time, in any way. But, if I drink it at a kitchen table, I
can be confident that I will know what I am doing. I will have done it before, I will
think to myself, and I may do it again.
This is the calm of repetition and those who are familiar with Murakami will
also know that this is his moment: being simultaneously in the presence of difference
and familiarity. Every beer I have consumed, or will consume, is individual and,
bound within that, different from other beers at this and other kitchen tables. If the
situation is the same, the day is different, or the brand, or the molecular composition;
and, with that we have encountered the Derridian iteration within the six-pack. My
beer is not entirely strange and yet it is of the moment: me and this beer have not
been together before. Yet, it cannot escape being the same, not just because it is a
mass-produced product consumed in a mass-produced circumstance (for who does
not have a kitchen table?) but because it is; it is, was and can be again, so it is
constructed towards nostalgia while also standing solid in the present. My beer
cannot escape repetition. I rely on that much.
Can literature be spoken of in the same way? It seems immediately precarious
because while one makes choices about reading based on prior experience – so
searching out a reiteration or rephrasing – I do not want to hear the “same thing”
over and over. This is, in fact, a primary protocol of casual or critical reading.
Repetition, intended as synonymical with predictability, is enjoyable in chick lit (a
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colloquialism paired with an abbreviation), but it is not a quality of literature (almost
deserving of a capital).
Or maybe I am conflating a quirk of communal language. I like an author not
because he or she says the same thing over and over, but because they express a wide
variety of situations in a common way, with a common humour or language. They
draw me to new ideas and topics, and each time they do it they make the hook
interesting, and thus, I go back. I say again: any beer, any table. There is always a
thread of iteration. Perhaps here Murakami will coincide with both his critics and my
beer: clear, cold, a sharp and delightful repetition.
In a story recently published in the New Yorker called ‘The Kidney-Shaped
Stone That Moves Every Day’ (26/09/05) Murakami writes about an author, Junpei,
who counts down the important woman in his life – one to three – because of a small
piece of fatherly advice (see ‘prophecy’ as trope, below). Certain that number one is
behind him, he becomes circumspect:
‘Whenever Junpei met a new woman, he would ask himself, ‘Is this a woman
who has real meaning for me?’ And the question would create a dilemma. For even
as he continued to hope (as who does not?) that he would meet someone who had
real meaning for him, he was afraid of playing his few remaining cards too early.’
At a friend’s party Junpei, who by this time is down to his last chance, meets a
woman named Kirie. Junpei is wearing ‘a Perry Ellis shirt of deep-blue silk’, she
drinks ‘a purple cocktail’, and his ‘first thought on seeing her was: Here is a woman
with excellent posture.’ They start a relationship but Kirie remains mysterious,
forestalling Junpei from knowing too much about her and so, Junpei believes,
ensuring that she does not acquire ‘real meaning’.
Within this story, Junpei is writing a story; the story about the kidney-shaped
stone. It is a story he cannot finish. When the ending does come to him it is an ending
not in keeping with his previous work; it is, in fact, however, definitively Murakami.
It is the same ending the umbrella story has. It is as though Junpei’s story was
compelled; it could not turn away, could not create a diversion, could not wander
down a pointless path. It had to be a reiteration, and like the beer, it had to be linked
in some structural manner, to Murakami’s work.
They are not the same story in any sense, but they are similar; both to each
other and to Murakami’s fiction; part of a spectrum bound by certain commonalities
of language, content and/or narrative assumptions. Reading this story, one always
has a sense of where one is going; away from, and thus towards, Murakami.
At that point I approach Kafka on the Shore, Murakmai’s most recent nostalgic
construction.
The cool reception of this latest novel coincides with Murakami’s literary
reputation generally, as well as the aforementioned uncertainty iteration in art
provokes. Initially Murakami – owner of a Jazz bar, a man who preferred J.D
Salinger’s Glass family to Mishima’s Honda (Japanese authors leave him ‘cold’) –
was designated as trivial to the literary canon. His prose style was open, simple,
politically and ethically neutral. His novels, popular as they were, were just
batakusai1, a symptom of banal and buttery imported culture. In this way his novels,
debated as they were, were conceptualised as a historical fancy, the debate over his
value maintaining its importance as an indicator of the frictions between Japan’s
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success and its imagination; between economic exchange and cultural isolation;
between dairy dollars and a pure palate.
Now that criticism has found him a home – perhaps the Asian man following
Fitzgerald – a shadow of the batakusai categorisation remains, though through
perseverance and a recent concern with Japan, his reputation has become more
certain. Even in the West Murakami’s work has become a ‘taste’, artistically good but
only ‘if you like that type of thing’. Which is perhaps why Kafka on the Shore, though
divergent from previous novels, wears the ambivalent diagnosis of being ‘businessas-usual.’ It seems entirely in keeping that the main character would be called Kafka
Tamura, unblinkingly, because this type of thing has been done before. The way
Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie” was employed in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as a
whistle half-remembered; in Murakami’s oeuvre a silent pucker of the lips in a
secluded hallway, at the beginning of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,
is understandably translated as the word ‘Proust’. These references are the phantoms
of meaning, the reminders of Japan as-it-is rather than Japan as-it-is-broadcast.
These ‘buttery’ goods have been progressively phased out by Murakami,
however in Kafka on the Shore he becomes bolder with the usage of Western icons,
enlisting the help of Johnny Walker, Colonel Sanders, Aristophanes and Beethoven
(to name but a few). These figures are not just walk-on references, spied on a passing
t-shirt or floating into a casual conversation, but, in the case of velvet-jacketed
Walker and rotund Sanders, are given roles as important characters.
There is an interesting doubling here, a laying of frames and content featured
throughout the book. Johnny Walker is Johnny Walker – Western whisky icon, the
dapper man on his way to somewhere more refreshing – but he is also a man who
eats the hearts of stolen cats. The commercial figure, hollow in itself, has been made
monstrous but no more defined; his hat casts a shadow over his face; he does not
have a face. A man playing dress-up, a man building a flute that will allow him to eat
souls. Murakami uses names, famous or not, as ciphers around which he can amass
sentiment without definition. Johnny Walker does not exist, but he is also Kafka’s
father; he simultaneously is and is not both the banal marketing icon and the cruel
man Murakami makes him seem. When he is murdered the fact that Kafka’s father
dies in the same house in the same way becomes rather a coincidence than a unified
event. Kafka wakes up with blood on his hands. This is the constant ambivalence of
Murakami’s fiction. It is and is not; Johnny Walker is a dark ambiguous hollow.
This doubling also features in the narrative assumptions of the novel. The
extraordinary is not presented as requiring of explanation – the kind of questionbegging usually associated with ‘portal stones’ and fish falling from the sky – but
rather as simply extant, there, a natural event in the same realm as beers and kitchen
tables. These are the kind of dual movements that sustain Murakami’s fiction,
between the surreal-as-assumed and the reader’s search for consistency or certainty.
Kafka on the Shore however, unlike other Murakami novels, does not maintain
this kind of unity. It is not a two-ended arrow like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
switching between a dream world and the waking mundane, but rather a composite,
a larger structure with sharp angles. Reading the book, re-reading the book, I was
constantly in mind not of an empty house – the house of Kobo Abe or Mishima, cold
and ghostly – but the frame of a house; timber beams on which a structure might be
built but, purposefully, has not been. It is not unfinished. It is a finished frame.
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This novel does not maintain the normal Murakami unity because it is a
collage, a welding of separate ideas that all seem compelled towards reiteration. A
library, a beautiful sad woman, music, dreams, a portal, large amounts of food,
undisclosed secrets and a cold beer in a kitchen, these are all the tropes and
touchstones a reader comes to expect but not all in one book, not all of them
oblivious to each other. This is not just a feature of Murakami using multiple
narratives but instead his presentation of different unrelated un-real structures. Kafka
on the Shore is a collage of as-yet-unwritten Murakami ideas.
Perhaps, as a reader, I am witnessing my first authorial stutter. But this novel
carried the positive aspects of rephrasing. A recombination as an elucidation, not a
form of mechanical reproduction or Sisyphus on repeat. This is, I think, the crux of a
reader’s enjoyment of Murakami, whether or not you see his narratives as ongoing
projects, as evolving explanations.
I cannot seem to approach this novel traditionally. It is a bare structure; its
content and meanings exist ‘somewhere else’, perhaps in the reader, but not in the
book. It is a Murakami novel and, as I might stretch that statement, business-asusual. However it was also unexpected and while I thought I had maybe read
enough Murakami, I found, much like me at my kitchen table, over time, experience
requires rejuvenation. I function as writing does: not through doing once, but
through reiteration.
Timothy NEALE
University of Auckland
1
Meaning ‘stinking of butter’ and used to describe Western culture; everything from Elvis to
Aristophanes has a whiff of pasturised milk products. This is because, as Ian Buruma points out, ‘the
Japanese, like the Chinese, didn’t eat milk products, so to them all Westerners smelled milky, or
buttery, or cheesy’.
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