J 314 Kafka on the Shore:
Some thoughts on how amazing it is that the novel is starting to talk (Ch. 19, pp. 171ff) about a complex web of things associated with:
--The Song "Kafka on the Shore"
--The Painting of the same name
--And, of course, the novel we're reading, also Kafka on the Shore
--So a kind of Triangular Relationship is established as Kafka looks at the Painting, Listens to the Song, and stares at the figure of the young girl, the apparition who is visiting his room.
Of course, he is doing this in the very space where the people whose experience gave birth to the Song originally lived, loved, and created.
--Right? Because the Room in the Komura Memorial where the Painting Hangs today
--Is where Kafka will be staying!
--The Room in which is where Miss Saeki and her boyfriend used to hang out all the time
--Despite being so young, they were genuinely and passionately in love, probably sexually active, real soulmates...and only 14-15 years old. Like Romeo and Juliet!
But then it's really much more complicated than just a Triangular Relationship, because WE are there too..
--Plus, we hear about the Lyrics and how they originated as a poem
--And how they were symbolic, contemplative, hard to figure out
--And we also have to add in an aural element, the Melody which was "melancholy, innocent and lovely"
--How the contrast between Melody and Lyrics gave the song a kind of "spirit and immediacy"
FROM THE TEXT:
We first learn about the poem-song composed by Miss Saeki when Oshima is telling Kafka “a couple of things you should know about Miss Saeki.” (155-160).
"When she was still in grade school, she had a sweetheart. The eldest son of the Komura family….They were the same age and made a handsome couple, a regular Romeo and Juliet. They lived near each other and were never apart. And when they became adults they fell in love. They were like one body and spirit according to my mother." (155-56)
When the young Komura was eighteen, he went off to Tokyo for college, they were apart for the first time in their lives.
“When she was nineteen Miss Saeki wrote a poem, set it to music and played the piano and sang it. It was a melancholy melody, innocent and lovely. The lyrics, on the other hand, were symbolic, contemplative, hard to figure out. The contrast gave the song a kind of spirit and immediacy. Of course, the whole song, lyrics and melody, was her way of crying out to her boyfriend, so far away. She sang the song a few times in front of people. She was ordinarily shy but she loved to sing and had even been in a folk music band in college. Someone was very impressed by the song, made a demo tape, and sent it to a friend of his who was a director at a record company. He loved the song and had her go to their studio and record it.
It was her first time in Tokyo, and she was able to see her boyfriend. Between recording sessions they were able to love each other, as before. My mother said she thought they’d had a sexual relationship since they were around fourteen. Both were rather precocious, and like many precocious people they found it hard to grow up. It was as if they were eternally fourteen or fifteen.” (156-156)
“…Anyway, the record went on sale and was a huge hit. It kept on selling—a million copies, two million, I’m not sure of the exact figure. At any rate, it was a record-breaking number at the time. Her photo was on the record jacket, a picture of her seated at a grand piano in the studio, smiling at the camera.” (157)
Miss Saeki’s boyfriend died when he was only twenty, the victim of the senseless, mindless violence rooted in the factionalism of the radical student movement, just at the time when “Kafka on the Shore” became a super hit record. (158)
As a result, Miss Saeki never sang again. She locked herself in her room and wouldn’t talk to anybody, even on the phone. She didn’t even go to his funeral, and dropped out of college….She vanished into thin air. (158-159)
As Oshima understands it, “Miss Saeki’s life basically stopped at age twenty….Miss Saeki has a wounded heart.” (161)
Strangely, though, twenty-five years later, Miss Saeki reappears in Takamatsu. She becomes head of the Komura Library. In fact,
“Her boyfriend used to live in a building that’s part of the library now….He lived in that annex…Miss Saeki went to see him there almost every day. The two of them studied together, listened to music, and talked forever. And most likely made love there. The place was their own bit of paradise….that’s where you’ll be living, now, Kafka. In that room.” (161)
So there we have it! Kafka will be staying in the room where the painting hangs. All this "data" is brought together for us in just a few pages!
We learn from all this that Miss Saeki
--Was young, precocious
--Had a male lover
--Was a folkie, performed in a folk group in college
--Wrote this song for her boyfriend
--Recorded it in a Studio
--It became an enormous hit
--Her picture was out there on the record jacket, probably one of those little 45 rpm records
So now, we as readers have a clear PICTURE of all this.
Oh, but that's not ALL!
--We also have more visual data, the Photo of Miss Saeki seated at the Piano for the Cover or Record Jacket for the Record when it was released
--Which then became a "huge hit": 2-3 million copies sold!
--And we learned that young Mr. Komura died when he was only twenty, the victim of the senseless, mindless violence rooted in the factionalism of the radical student movement
--And this sad event occurs just at the time “Kafka on the Shore” was becoming a mega hit record
--And that Miss Saeki never sang again
--She locked herself in her room and wouldn’t talk to anybody, even on the phone
--She didn’t even go to his funeral, and dropped out of college….
--And finally, she vanished into thin air. (158-159)
--So we learn that Miss Saeki’s life basically stopped at age twenty….
--And that she suffers from "a wounded heart” and this is "a special individual wound that goes beyond the usual meaning of the term." (161)
--Bottom line, she is beautiful, charming, deep and intelligent...but she is also, "odd," maybe a bit "other" as opposed to "normal" people. She has been through things most of us have not.
In a word, there is an awful lot to take in and digest here!
And this isn't even ALL of it!
We have not exhausted the topic of the Song, the Painting, the Music, the Lyrics, and all the ramifications!
Later on, in Ch. 25, we will learn more about:
--The Song's Melody
--The accompanying Sheet Music
--The "Mysterious" Two Chords
--And we revisit the Lyrics when they are reproduced in their entirety in Ch. 23 (227-28) and thoroughly discussed/analyzed
--We learn more about the Recording sessions in the Studio
--Miss Saeki’s Piano Playing and Singing
—And all of these diverse pieces, these constituent elements, are brought together right in the middle, the center of the novel to inform us and even to challenge us on how we should read and think about this text!
I love it!
It is really an intricate and complex moment!
Painting, Music, Lyrics, Poetic Expression, Loss, Sadness. Heartbreak, How the Past can Live On and Shape our lives...So much to work with!
I find it noteworthy that Murakami writes about how it is the innocence, the directness of "Kafka on the Shore," that exudes a certain power, a spirit and immediacy which grabs us, and won't let go.
Yet it also contains an element of mystery, balancing a variety of opposites, complexities and, of course, ambiguities.
Apparently, the Song is "the product of a capable yet unselfish heart."
One of the remarkable things about this novel—and there are many—is the way the author places at the center of his narrative this Painting and the Song which both happened to be called “Kafka on the Shore,” which of course also references the title of the novel itself.
Aren't these all rather important signals for us as readers?
Murakami spends some time talking in detail about the Painting itself—when, where and by whom it was painted; and also about how the song was composed, how it originated as a poem, and then was put to music.
So, this is quite a bit of info that is being laid out for us, kind of like an old picture scroll--but with an audio track. I just don't know of another piece of modern fiction that attempts this!
The text also has lots to say about the music itself, how Kafka gets a hold of a copy of the sheet music for the song (248), and how its melody features an unusual chord progression that keeps it from “degrading into some silly pop song, giving it special depth and substance.” (251).
And also the Lyrics of the song are themselves “reproduced” in the text (227-28). This comes just after the section in which we get a reference to Bob Dylan’s double LP, Blonde on Blonde [BTW, this was the first EVER Rock double album to be releaed!]
This is noteworthy because at least part of Bob Dylan’s legacy is that he forced listeners in the 1960s to think more about what lyrics in popular music can be, what they should be, how pop songs could have and ought to have some content; they ought to be about something, they ought to have something to say, not just sentimentalize about things.
Dylan also asked listeners to re-imagine everything they thought they knew about the world of folk and pop music. He defied the norms of the times--and the requirements of AM pop radio--by writing long, complicated songs filled with literary allusions.
His well-known pop hit, "Like a Rolling Stone," was six minutes long. The industry norm was songs that were 2-3 minutes in length. AM Radio was just not set up for anything longer, so DJs on pop stations didn't know what to do with "Like a Rolling Stone." The record label, Columbia, issued the 45 rpm version of the song divided into tweo parts: the first half of the song on an A-side and the second on a B-side. Unprecedented.
A song from that same album that produced LRS ("Highway 61 Revisited"), called "Desolation Row," was over 11 minutes long and it is replete with characters taken straight from Literature, History and Pop Culture.
We encounter people like Romeo and Ophelia from Shakepeare, and modernist writers like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, along with Biblical figures like Cain and Abel, Noah, the Good Samaritan, as well as random figures like actress Bette Davis, the legerndary lover Casanova, Cinderella, the Phantom of the Opera, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Nero's Neptune, and even Albert Einstein. Einstein was ironically depicted as someone who was:
Famous long ago,
For playing the electric violin,
No one was writing anything like this in popular music before Dylan came along, and Murakami is informing his readers that he is well-aware of this.
The upshot is that Murakami is putting in front of his readers all of these ideas--these different varieties of musical, written and artisic expression--as a context for us to consider. We don't necessarily expect to encounter commentary on all of these dimensions of creative expression in a novel: writing, composing music, singing, permforming it, recording it, as well as painting, and all types of films. Yet it’s all there!
AND HE KEEPS TAKING US DEEPER.
In Ch. 23, for example, Kafka sees the young Miss Saeki in the form of a ghost or spirit who comes to visit the room he occupies—the room in which she and her boyfriend spent so much time together.
She cannot see Kafka, even though she looks right at him, and she shows no signs of life. This nocturnal visit prompts Kafka to ask Oshima to get him a copy of the record of “Kafka on the Shore,” not a CD but the record. Vinyl. Because that will sound the most authentic. Oshima does. His mother was still holding on to 5 copies! (222)
THE PHOTO ON THE RECORD JACKET
Now we get even more detail on the record’s cover photo as Kafka contemplates it:
Miss Saeki—she was nineteen according to Oshima—is sitting at a piano in the recording studio. Looking straight at the camera, she is resting her chin on her hands on the music stand, her head tilted slightly to one side, a shy, unaffected smile on her face, closed lips spread pleasantly wide, with charming lines at the corners. It doesn’t look like she is wearing any makeup. Her hair’s held back by a plastic clip so it won’t fall into her face, and part of her right ear’s visible through the strands. Her light blue dress is short and loose-fitting, and she has a silver bracelet on her left wrist, her only accessory. A pair of slender sandals is next to her piano stool, and her bare feet are lovely.
She looks like a symbol of something. A certain time, a certain place. A certain state of mind. An eternal naïve innocence, never to be marred, floats around her like spores in spring. Time had come to a standstill in this photograph. 1969—a scene from a long time before I was born.
I knew from the first that the young girl who visited my room last night was Miss Saeki. (222-223)
The fifteen-year old version was even more beautiful than the nineteen-year old one.
TIME FOR THE GENJI AND UEDA AKINARI
Then, on pp. 225-227, our old friend the Rokujô Lady is brought up (OMG!) because she became a "living spirit" who could travel through space and time and inhabit other bodies. Apparently, this is something still worth keeping in mind when reading Japanese literature.
As Oshima explains, living spirits, ghosts, and spirit possession were all considered to be part of the natural condition in the Heian Period. "In Murasaki Shikibu's time living spirits were both a grotesque phenomenon and a natural condition of the human heart that was right there with them." (225)
As far as we know, "living spirits" spring from negative emotions. People today label it the ego or the sub- or unconsciouss...the part of us sunk in darkness.
Oshima digresses on one of the stories in Ueda Akinari's Tales of Moonlight and Rain about two samurai who were very close friends, like blood brothers; they promised to meet at a time certain but one got detained and could not come. The other commiitted hara-kiri, became a spirit, and traveled through time and space to sit with his friend near the chrysanthemums where they talk endlessly...until he vanishes.
THE LYRICS
And it is here, in Ch. 23, on pp. 227-228, that we are treated to the complete lyrics of the song for the first time:
Of course, this is a fictional composition, created by the author for his novel!
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 moon shines down on a sleeping lizard.
Little fish rain down from the sky.
Outside the window there are soldiers, steeling themselves to die.
It would seem that somehow the song anticipates current events, especially the bizarre raining down of fish that was predicted--and perhaps caused--by Mr. Nakata.
Kafka sits in a chair by the shore
Thinking of the pendulum that moves the world it seems.
The shadow of the unmoving Sphinx,
Becomes a knife that pierces your dreams.
The drowning girls fingers
Search for the entrance stone and more.
Lifting the hem of her azure dress,
She gazes--at Kafka on the Shore. (227-228)
So, we have "fish raining down from the sky," plus a clear mention of the "entrance stone," not to mention a knife (murder weapon?), and the pendulum that moves the world that sounds like an apt description of what the entrance stone can do!
HOW THE SONG AND MUSIC OPERATE ON US
We are informed that Kafka listens repeatedly to the song, and says “One by one the words find a home in my heart. It’s a weird feeling. Images beyond any meaning arise like cutout figures and stand alone just like when I’m in the middle of a deep dream.” (228)
This seems critical: Words, Images, and Meaning (i.e., the Thoughts/Ideas that are behind the Words and Images, that they are trying to convey to us) are all profoundly related. And they come to him as if he in "in the middle of a deep dream."
We are talking here about music, poetry, lyrics and how they enter our consciousness, and how they may invite us into the dream world, the realm of the sub-conscious, where much of what transpires is prefigured. Oddly, perhaps, this is exactly what jumped out to Carl Jung, Freud's peer and the pioneer psychologist who was interested in the sub- or unconscious world, when he encountered the great Chinese Book of Wisdom, the Yijing.
When this book was published in English in 1950--and had such a huge impact on the Beats and later the 1960s Counterculture, Bob Dylan included--Jung wrote a penetrating Introductory essay about how the Images (the Hexagrams) prefigure the Words which are what lead us to the Ideas that underlie this great work--and, really, all of Chinese philosophy. The value of the Images is that they point us to the Ideas behind them. They are the gateway to the Ideas; but of course we need Words or language in order to express our Ideas. As the great Han Dynasty scholar Wang Bi explained the circular and interdependent relationship between Images, Words and Ideas:
Images are the means to express Ideas. Words are the means to explain the Images. To yield up ideas completely, there is nothing better than the Images, and to yield up the meaning of the Images, there is nothing better than Words....The Ideas are yielded up completely by the Images, and the Images are made explicit by the Words.
Not that there is any textual evidence that the Yijing or Chinese Philosophy has much to do with Kafka on the Shore. That's not the point.
But the novel does have everything to do with Dreams, Metaphors, the Subconscious, and since Jung had such a large influence on the reception of the Yijing in the 1960s, it is worth noting, at least in passing.
THE GENJI AGAIN
Remember the passages about "living spirits" in the Genji when Oshima points out how
"Lady Rokujô [had] been flying through space and passing down the tunnel of her subconcious into Aoi's bedroom. This is one of the most uncanny and thrilling episodes in the Genji....Well before Freud and Jung shined a light on the workings of the subconscious...the correlation between...these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people." (225)
So, clearly Freud, Jung and the idea of traveling through "the tunnels of one's subconscious" were important themes in Kafka. We also see some of this in the conversations about how music can evoke very similar experiences. Kafka senses that in "Kafka on the Shore," it might be the unusual chord progression that grabs us and draws us into the Words and Ideas.
Kafka notes that:
“Two unusual chords appear in the refrain. The other chords in the song are nothing special, but these two are different, not the kind you can figure out by listening just a couple of times. At first I feel confused. To exaggerate a little, I feel betrayed even. The total unexpectedness of the sounds shook me, unsettled me…But once the refrain is over, the beautiful melody returns, taking you back to that original world of harmony and intimacy. (228)
Listening to it over and over, I start to get some idea why “Kafka on the Shore” moved so many people. The song’s direct and gentle at the same time, the product of a capable yet unselfish heart. There’s a kind of miraculous feel to it, this overlap of opposites. (228-29)
The miracle of the song is the "overlap of opposites" that shocks us out of our complacency--even makes us feel "betrayed"--but then returns us to "that original world of harmony and intimacy." It accomplishes this by reaching out and directly penetrating our hearts, our whole being, giving the song a truth and immediacy that most song lack.
THE GIRL, THE PAINTING, AND KAFKA
On the following page (Ch. 23: 229-230), Kafka contemplates the likelihood that the room he is living in at the library is where Miss Saeki wrote the lyrics to “Kafka on the Shore,” and he is sure that the "Kafka on the Shore" person who is the subject of her song, is the same young boy in the painting on the wall.
Kafka sits in the same chair that the ghost of the young Miss Saeki sat in the night before, holding his chin in his hands just like she did, and gazes at the painting. That, in itself, is a powerful image suggesting the importance of a Triangular Relationship in this scene between the Painting, the Young Girl, and Kafka!
It's really quite amazing!
Kafka then meditates on the fact that he is occupying the same space and perfoming the same "gaze" that she did. Which leads him to get up and go over to the painting and examine it closely. He says:
I’m positive now, this had to be where she wrote it. I see her gazing at the painting, remembering the young boy, writing the poem she then set to music. It had to have been at night, when it was pitch-dark outside.
I stand up, go over to the wall, and examine the painting up close. The young man is looking off in the distance, his eyes full of mysterious depth. In one corner of the sky there are some sharply outlined clouds, the largest sort of looks like a crouching Sphinx." (229)
Following the young boy's eyes which are full of "mysterious depth," Kafka is led to the clouds upon which they boy's eyes are focusing. Kafka goes from the Image of the clouds to the Ideas of the Sphinx and contemplates how the Sphinx was defeated by Oedipus which is what allowed him to become King of Thebes and marry the queen who was actually his mother--though he did not know it.
On her use of the name Kafka, he speculates that “Miss Saeki used it since in her mind the mysterious solitude of the boy in the picture overlapped with Kafka’s fictional world. That would explain the title: a solitary soul straying by an absurd shore.” (229, italics added)
The name Kafka, then, stands in for the Idea of "a solitary soul straying by an absurd shore.” You have to admit, this writer makes us think!
Interestingly, at the end of Ch. 23, Kafka turns to the Tanizaki translation of the Tale of Genji to get himself into the optimal mindset for the young Miss Saeki's next nocturnal visit.
Which takes place in Ch. 25, when Kafka has his second encounter with the ghost of the young Miss Saeki.
GHOST TIME AGAIN: 2nd Visit
He wakes up at 3:00 am and sees that "The girl is seated at the desk, head in her hands, gazing at the painting....She looks deep in thought. Or in the midst of a long, deep dream. Check that—maybe she herself is Miss Saeki’s long, deep dream.” (241)
So, the ghost or spirit is a projection from the real Miss Saeki?
This living spirit or ghost cannot see Kafka; he is not in her dream so he does not register in her visual field. It is the Painting that consumes her: “Her gaze falls back on Kafka on the Shore. Head in hands like before, her heart is drawn once more toward the boy in the summer scene.” (242)
WORDS, MEANING, DREAMS AND CREATIVITY
Still in Ch. 25, on p. 244, Oshima and Kafka are talking about the Lyrics to Kafka on the Shore and how they are symbolic, and how poetry and symbolism go together, and how meaning may be constructed in poems and songs.
Kafka asks:
“Do you think Miss Saeki knew what all the lyrics mean?”
“Not necessarily. Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly’s wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.”
“So you’re saying Miss Saeki found those words in some other space—like in dreams?”
“Most poetry is like that. If words can’t create a prophetic tunnel connecting them to the reader, then the whole thing no longer functions as a poem.” (244)
So, it sounds like it's one thing to represent something "symbolically," but that is not identical with actual "Meaning," with what the words convey to us through their use of symbols.
The point is, Miss Saeki "bypasses ordinary procedures like meaning and logic." Instead--fully in the moment--she has the artisitic capacity to reach her listeners' hearts and minds directly.
So, for Murakami, the author, Words, Meanings, Symbols, Logic, Ideas, Dreams, Language itself, are all related and are a part of how we construct meaning and find our place in the world. But the relationaship is never a direct, one-to-one kind of relationship.
What intrigues me is that in this section of Kafka, we get a complicated discourse on the art of writing poetry and of composing songs: how melody, singing, vocalization, song structure, chord progression and the actual lyrics themselves all combine in a unique way to create meaning.
We also learn about the recording process, the record release, its phenomenal success, and we get to contemplate the photo of Miss Saeki seated at the Piano as it appears on the jacket cover of the record.
This means we have a "thick description" of a moment in time, a creative act that yields a poem, a song, a performance, a recording, and they are all tied in with the painting of the same name, which at least in part inspired the words and the music in which we are now immersed. Quite a remarkable web of associations!
And it comes against the backdrop of lots other types music being played and listened to in the text: classical music, such as Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven; but also, Jazz and Rock. We hear about different perfoming artists, different recordings of some of the pieces, and Oshima talks a lot about the impact all this has on how he listens to, hears, and is affected by music.
THE SHORE AS DIVIDING LINE
So, back to Kafka's comment about a “solitary soul straying by an absurd shore.” What might that mean? What is this “absurd shore"?
Joy Meads notes that the shoreline in Kafka is “the border between the conscious and the unconscious minds," and she quotes Murakami to the effect that Kafka is “a story of two different worlds, consciousness and unconsciousness. Most of us are living in those two worlds, one foot in one or the other, and all of us are living on the borderline. That's my definition of human life.” (See below for more)
On pp. 248 Kafka and the present-day Miss Saeki talk...but he can see in her the 15-year old "spirit" or ghost who has been visiting him. She says Kafka reminds her of a 15-year old boy she once knew...OK, round and round we go.
It also pops into her memory that she once wrote a book about lightning for which she interviewed many people who had been struck by it in their lives. Kafka's father had himself been struck by lightning while playing golf? Did they meet?
She does not recall anyone named Tamura.
ONE MORE TIME: THE THIRD VISIT
In Ch. 27, the girl, or the spirit, visits him again for the third time. Now Kafka will mention explicitly in the text how the "Painting, girl and me--we form a triangle in the room." (263)
Three visits and a Triangular Relationship: the Painting, the Young Girl, and Kafka. But also, the Song, its Words and the Boy form another Triangle.
And then there is also we, the Readers, the Novel, and the Scenes we are reading involving the Song, its Lyrics, and the Painting. It gets deep and convoluted!
Kafka actually sits there in the Room, contemplates the Painting, mimicking the way his Ghost Visitor sits, chin in hand, studying the Painting, and Remembering.
Again, on this third visit, she seems to stare directly at him--but she she does not see him. Instead, she looks straight through him, unseeing. This time, he actually tries speaking to her, though, calling out her name three times. But he receives no response.
Later, he asks the real Miss Saeki if she ever had children but she cannot give him a straight yes or no answer. Oh, well!
BUT WE ARE STILL NOT DONE
In Ch. 31, Kafka is speaking with Miss Saeki in real time and offers his "Theory."
First, he wonders if Miss Saeki came back to Takamatsu in order to die. This connects with his idea that his Father was in love with Miss Saeki but because he could not win her back, he wanted to die. Which is why he wanted his son (Miss Saeki's son?) to murder him.
And why he "programmed" his son, Kafka, with his "curse" to try and make him murder his father, and sleep with both his mother and his sister.
But Kafka did not murder his father, at least not directly. But is the point here that his father's spirit somehow possessed Nakata and put pressure on him to commit this murder? And/Or was this an indirect route to Kafka through Nakata?
We know that physically, Kafka could not have committed the murder. He was in Takamatsu. Yet he woke up there at a Shinto Shrine in a bloody tee-shirt with no explanation for how the blood got there.
Meanwhile, in far off Tokyo, Mr. Nakata was confronted by some crazy phanstasm, "Johnnie Walker." Was Mr. Nakata somehow functioning as Kafka's surrogate?
Later, he will tell Miss Saeki (towards the end of the novel):
"I didn't want to kill anybody, but Johnnie Walker was in charge and I took the place of a fifteen-year old boy who should've been there and I murdered someone." (390)
OK...So does that make Johnnie Walker just another apparition, an illusion, a "projection" of Kafka's father's living spirit? Since they each utter the same remark about "Sicence can never progress if Theories do not generate counter evidence," (128, 204) that would suggest one is a projection of the other.
If that's the case, was Nakata actually taking the life of a human being, namely Tamura Kôichi?
But why is Johnnie Walker so evil? In the Genji, this was not the case with the Rokujô Lady....And, think about it, is Col. Sanders, the other iconic, marketing figure associated with a specific product, also evil? He seems to be more of an amoral kind of "fixer" of things and situations. As he informs us, he's neither a God nor a Buddha.
Remember, when asked why he felt the need to run away from home, Kafka explained that he needed to get out of there because, "I felt like if I stayed there I'd be damaged beyond repair." (248)
What does he mean by "damaged"?
"I mean I'd change into something I shouldn't." (249)
So for Kafka, the move is a desperate one, necessary for his survival. Just as Nakata's decision to do Johnnie Walker's bidding and kill him was also an act of desperation. He had no choice.
Plus, Kafka admits to feeling at times "like there's somebody else living inside me." (266) And these were connected to blackouts and violent rages that he experienced.
THE OMEN OR PROPHECY
And the Prophecy? Technically, Kafka never does sleep with his sister since a) we don't know for sure that Sakura is his sister; and b) their moment of most intense and violent passion--when he "rapes" her--occurred only in his Dream.
Again, how important are Dreams and the Unconscious to this narrative? There are so many interpretive possibilites here. Kafka has already realized this when he observes, "There are just too many coincidences." (253, and that's how Ch. 25 ends)
Fast forward to Ch. 31 where, on pp. 295-298, we find Kafka asking the "real" Miss Saeki where she found those two chords she used in her song:
“I found those two chords in an old room, very far away. The door to the room was open then,” she says quietly. “A room that was far, far away.” (295)
OK, is this a room that she had to move the Entrance Stone in order to enter?
Miss Saeki comes to Kafka’s room that night—not the ghost, the real Miss Saeki.
“I haven’t seen this room in a long time,” she says.
She stands by the wall and looks at the painting.
“Or this picture, either.”
“Who painted it?’ Kafka asks.
“A young artist who boarded that summer with the Komuras,” she says…”I think he did a good job with the painting. There’s something, I don’t know—powerful about it. I sat beside him the whole time and watched him work. I made all kinds of half-joking suggestions as he painted. We got along well. It was a summer a long time ago. I was twelve then. The boy in the painting was twelve, too.” (298)
OK, so clearly the Kafka in the painting must be the young Komura boy with whom Miss Saeki was so deeply in love. Now we have completed that Triangle (for the time being): Miss Saeki, the Painting, and the Young Boy, presumably Komura.
ARE WE DONE YET? NO....
Miss Saeki decides to show Kafka where the painting was painted so the two of them walk to the nearby beach.
"It was right over there,” she says. “He painted from that spot from here. He put the deck chair over there, had the boy pose in it, set up his easel right around here. I remember it well….” (298)
Now it becomes all the more mind-boggling as we continue to accumulate all this information, these inputs, about the Painting--to go along with what we learned about the Song--about when, and by whom it was created, so details on the conditions and circumstances of its productionare now put on the table.
All of this comes at a pivotal moment in the narrative when so many disparate elements are being brought together: the Painting, the Song, the Lyrics--how they were composed and why--the Recording Sessions, the Music, the Strange Chords, the Photo on the cover of the single, the reception of the song, conversations between Oshima and Kafka as they explore ideas about Poetry, Symbolism, Dreams--and how Miss Saeki bypassed normal logic and verbal expressions of Meaning--while Kafka and Miss Saeki themselves also exploring their relationship in the context of the Past. Whew!
That is truly quite a remarkable depiction of a series of interrelated moments all having to do with the creative processes!!
NOW ARE WE DONE? NOT QUITE!!
We still have to think about other worlds and alternative realities:
"When I was fifteen," Miss Saeki says with a smile, "all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody's reach. A place beyond the flow of time...I thought there had to be a place like that in the world. I was sure that somewhere I'd run across the entrance that would take me to that other world." (249, italics mine)
This is when Kafka is inspired to go back to his room and study the sheet music for "Kafka on the Shore," and he even tries playing the melody himself on a piano.
Then he also pays attention to all of the pop music albums stored in his room, such classics as Bob Dylan’s double LP, Blonde on Blonde (the first ever rock double album), the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and their double LP record known as the White Album. Also mentioned are the Rolling Stones, Prince, the Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, Simon and Garfunkel, Otis Redding’s song and album, Dock of the Bay, Stan Getz’s Getz/Gilberto—most of all of these being hit albums from the 1960s.
He broods about the song's Chords, its Lyrics, their Meaning, the reference to the "Entrance Stone," and concludes from this that she must have located that entrance stone and gone to another world. (252)
SO THIS IS IT, RIGHT? FOR NOW, MAYBE...
BUT NOPE.
As intense and remarkable as all of these passages are, they do not complete Murakami's consideration of the Song and the Painting quite yet. More will be surfacing towards the end of the novel.
For more from later in the text, go here.
Instructions