This week I started reading Kafka on the Shore. This is a Haruki Murakami novel, one I haven't read before. You could say it's about a runaway on a quest. There is also material about fallout - literal and otherwise - from the Hiroshima bombing.
It's very Murakami. Which is to say there's a background of people doing routine, dull things and thinking not-so-very-deep thoughts, all narrated in a deadpan tone. But that tone remains when more dramatic things happen, for the most part. Which by association makes the other stuff kind of eerie.
So far I've read the runaway hero of the book getting a hand job from a woman who, if I know my foreshadowing, is a blood relative of his. Also an ambiguously supernatural predator tries to goad a kindly old man into killing him by cutting the throats of defenseless cats. These are both, on differing levels, upsetting scenes. Especially the cat thing. But the book remains compulsively readable.
It's very Murakami. Which is to say there's a background of people doing routine, dull things and thinking not-so-very-deep thoughts, all narrated in a deadpan tone. But that tone remains when more dramatic things happen, for the most part. Which by association makes the other stuff kind of eerie.
So far I've read the runaway hero of the book getting a hand job from a woman who, if I know my foreshadowing, is a blood relative of his. Also an ambiguously supernatural predator tries to goad a kindly old man into killing him by cutting the throats of defenseless cats. These are both, on differing levels, upsetting scenes. Especially the cat thing. But the book remains compulsively readable.
2 comments:
a deep, hallucinatory, mystifying, extraordinarily melancholic, & occasionally harshly disturbing book, & one of my favorites of murakami's (&, imo, maybe his last 'great' book - i'm not a fan of 1q84). the initial sequence featuring johnny walker is a hard one to forget...
i've read through all of his books at least twice, & a few ('hard-boiled wonderland', 'wild sheep chase', 'dance dance dance', 'wind-up bird chronicle') more than that. remembering the scenario at the end of fahrenheit 451, a few years back, where everyone was responsible for memorizing a single book, i realized that the book i'd choose would be 'hard-boiled wonderland'...
anyway, glad to hear you're enjoying it. &, not wanting to spoil anything, i'll leave you with the quote i just found on the wiki:
"Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren't any solutions provided. Instead, several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It's hard to explain, but that's the kind of novel I set out to write..."
Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders as the elemental forces of the universe. There's something very right about that, if perhaps also something quite wrong. In any case they both have pretty stunning introductions.
There are worse things to be than the bard of Hard Boiled Wonderland. Certainly it gives you a lot to remember. And who knows? Things may yet come to that.
That's a fascinating insight into Murakami's creative goals. There's a sense of non-linear build to the novel and I think he gets at the quality he was going for. People will be reading him and trying to imitate him for a long time.
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