J314 Kafka Song and Painting II
Later on in the novel, it falls to Mr. Nakata to close the entrance opened so many years ago by Miss Saeki. This is part of his mission which he could not fully comprehend. It must have started with the encounter with Johnnie Walker (Kafka's father's spirit?) but for the next stage, he needs help.
Enter Mr. Hoshino who will join him because he reminds him of his Grandfather who nurtured him--always had his back--but who died before Hoshino could ever properly thank him. This is his payback!
Back around the time that Miss Saeki was composing her song, "Kafka on the Shore," she first encountered the entrance stone and now she admits that it was she who unwittingly opened the entrance way back then. She was just trying “to prevent our perfect, private world from collapsing.” (393)
She explains:
“We lived in perfect circle, where everything inside was complete. Of course, that couldn’t go on forever. We grew up and times changed. Parts of the circle fell apart and the outside world came rushing into our private paradise, and things inside tried to get out. All quite natural, I suppose, yet at the time I couldn’t accept it. And that’s why I opened the entrance stone—to prevent our perfect, private world from collapsing. I can’t remember now how I managed to do it, but I decided I had to open the stone no matter what—so I wouldn’t lose him, so things from the outside wouldn’t destroy our world. I didn’t understand at the time what it would mean. And of course, I received my punishment.” (392)
Yes, and her punishment was very harsh. Her boyfriend was senselessly and brutally murdered by pointless factionalism in the student movement of the late 1960s.
When Miss Saeki meets up with Mr. Nakata at the Komura Library, near the end of the novel, she feels she has met him somewhere before:
“I feel like I’ve known you for ages," Miss Saeki said. “Weren’t you in that painting, a figure in the background? White pants legs rolled up, dipping your feet in the water?” (393)
Wait, whaat? This is the first time that we have heard anything about a figure in the painting who is standing in the sea with his pants rolled up....True, in Ch. 19, when Kafka is studying the painting carefully, he notes that "In the backround is the sea and a couple of other people, but they're too far away to make out their faces." (172) There is nothing here about "white pants legs rolled up," but the presence of somebody is noted. So, it IS something! Is it possible he was there?
However, if Miss Saeki turned 20 in 1970, then she would've been 12 at the time of the painting (she said as much!) , and the year would have been 1962. Mr. Nakata, aged 9 in 1944, would've been about 26 or 27 in 1962 and by that time, he had been working in the furniture workshop in Nagano Prefecture since he was 15 years old and not given to traveling anywhere as far as we know. (See pp. 212-213) His grandparents and later his parents passed away, but he continued to work hard every day but since he couldn't read or write, and we know he did not like to travel outside his comfort zone, it is not very plausible that he would have found himself in Shikoku at the beach...Who would have taken him there?
Besides, the last time he could recall being at the seashore was a trip to Enoshima while he was still in elementary school, so probably not long after the war because he mentions the presence of lots of American soldiers: "Japan was occupied by the Americans back then. The seashore at Enoshima was filled with American soldiers." (216) This prompts Hoshino's ill-informed comment that "Come on, Japan was never been occupied by America!" Incorrect. The Occupation Period lasted from August 1945-April 1952. So the timing for Mr. Nakata being in Shikoku in 1962 seems considerably off.
Anyway, Miss Saeki had explained to Nakata how she came across the Entrance Stone a long time ago and used it to try to protect herself and the Boy in the Painting, the Young Komura. She did not know it would change so many other things in the world.
Now, she has a favor to ask of Nakata: take the boxes of paper on which she was recorded all her memories and burn them. After Nakata and Hoshino take the boxes and leave, she lays her head down on her desk and breathes her last.
It is Tuesday afternoon at 4:35 pm.
Hoshino and Mr. Nakata do burn Miss Saeki's memoirs and watch the answers we lould love to have go up in smoke and drift away.
Kafka goes into the Forest on the following Wednesday, spends a night in the Village in his little cabin where a young girl--with no name, no memories, no identity, but a spitting image of the 15 year old Miss Saeki from his dreams--comes in and cooks and cleans for him whenever he needs it. Of course, she does not recognize him.
But the following day, Thursday, the "real" or older Miss Saeki shows up and talks with Kafka in the Village that is hidden deep in the forest (the labyrinth). Of course, she had passed away two days before back in Takamatsu.
She has an urgent message for Kafka. He must, "get out of here," he leave the Village and go back to the life he left. He protests that he has no life to go back to; no one there loves or cares about him.
Miss Saeki insists, "It's what I want. For you to be there."
Why? She needs him to be there to remember her.
"I want you to remember me. If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets." (440)
She also tells him:
“I want you to take that painting with you.”
“You mean the one in my room at the library? The painting on the shore?”
Miss Saeki nods.
“Yes, Kafka on the Shore. I want you to take it with you. Where, I don’t care. Wherever you are going.”
“But doesn’t it belong to somebody?”
She shakes her head. “It’s mine. He gave it to me as a present when he went away to college in Tokyo. Ever since I have had it with me….I left a letter for Oshima telling him I wanted you to have the painting. After all, the painting is originally yours.”
“Mine?”
She nods. “You were there. And I was there beside you, watching you. On the shore, a long time ago. The wind is blowing, there were white puffy clouds, and it was always summer.” (440-441)
Wait a minute, whaat? How could Kafka have been there? It was 40 years ago! Twenty-five years before he was even born!!?? Unless...
Does Miss Saeki perceive the spirit of the young Komura continuing on in Kafka somehow? Does she fall into a dream state in which Kafka and Komura are one and the same? Komura's spirit or soul is alive inside Kafka? That might explain why she acts the way she does with Kafka....In fact, to her, at least in that moment, he is not Kafka but Komura.
Kafka closes his eyes and actually “remembers” being there, remembers being in love with her....so there must be a connection between Kafka and Komura. Does Kokura's spirit live on inside of Kafka? Perhaps that explains why he was drawn there--to Shikoku, to Takamatsu and to the Komura Memorial Library--in the first place.
As they hold each other, Kafka asks her point blank,
"Are you my mother?" I'm finally able to ask.
"You already know the answer to that," Miss Saeki says.
"A long time ago I abandoned someone I shouldn't have," she says. "Someone I loved more than anything else. I was afraid someday I'd lose this person...I decided it was better to discard him myself. Of course I felt anger that didn't fade, that was part of it. But the whole thing was huge mistake. It was someone I should never have abandoned." (441)
This seems tantamount to a confession that she abandoned someone, probably Kafka, because she knew she was going to lose him anyway. So she was protecting herself from greater pain down the road?
"Kafka--do you forgive me?"
"Do I have the right to?"
"As long as anger and fear don't prevent you."(442)
Here we are with Anger and Fear again. They are what drive people to war.
Kafka does forgive her. Crow chimes in:
Mother, you say. I forgive you. And with those words, audibly, the frozen part of your heart crumbles.
This seems like a major internal transformation inside of Kafka has ocurred. He should feel liberated and triumphant but, instead....
He worries that he does not know what it means to live.
"Look at the painting," she says quietly. "Keep looking at the painting, just like I did." (442)
So, it sounds like she might, indeed, be the woman who gave birth to Kafka, a boy she abandoned four years later. Her inner life had already frozen, but fear and anger drove her to do something she regretted. More than that, it destroyed her, it emptied her out, took away her identity, who she was.
She was already dead inside after Mr. Komura's murder, but she went through the motions and tried to be a wife and mother. It was not possible. She was too empty. Kafka has long wanted to understand why his mother did not love him enough to stay with him, or at least take him away with her, too. The answer may be that since her heart was frozen and she was emptied out. It simply was not possible for her to love nyone in the normal sense of the word.
It certainly does seem that deep down, Kafka is the receptacle for the living spirit of her boyfriend, the conduit for Mr. Komura’s soul.
In the end, the advice Kafka receives about how to deal with all the struggles and pain that life brings his way is to “Keep looking at the painting.”
To this, the Boy Named Crow adds,
“And listen to the wind.”
Oh, Hey, Okay, why not? Listen to the Wind. Great idea!
We might do well to recall a couple of things.
1. One, something that Murakami said in an interview:
"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."
https://www.steppenwolf.org/articles/into-the-labyrinth-the-dream-logic-of-kafka-on-the-shore/
Yes, it is hard to explain...and to understand! In the end, it is up to each of us as readers to solve the riddles to our own satisfaction, and then to construct the meaning of the text for ourselves. Yay, Lucky us!
But really, isn't that just being transparent about how literature often works--or at least one of the ways that it can work. We are always actively involved constructing meaning out of what we take in through our eyes, through the medium of language, and process with our brains.
Kafka on the Shore is replete with Riddles, that's for sure. Here are some that I have wrestled with over the years:
1. Riddle No. 1: Is Sakura Kafka's sister? Not impossible but seems unlikely. Kafka's sister was adopted, Sakura apparently wasn't. She remembers living with her parents in Ichikawa City, Chiba, though she did not get along with them particularly well. She doesn't look like the little girl in the photo and when she saw it, she did not react at all. There seems little chance she is Kafka's older sister.
She said she had a younger brother about Kafka's age, but he had lied to her about his age, saying he was 17. So, is Sakura's brother more like 17? Kafka does reveal the truth when he calls Sakura after waking up in the Shrine in a bloody tee-shirt when he said his sister would be twenty-one now--6 years older than him).
2. A related question: Kafka's older sister was adopted yet his mother took her--not Kafka--when she left. Why? This is never fully addressed.
3. Riddle No. 2: Is Johnnie Walker a projection of Kafka's father or at least his "living spirit"? We don't get to see or know much about Kafka's father in the text. He is largely absent. We know he is a renowned Sculptor who has a series called "Labyrinth," and that he and his son are not close...but we know of no hatred or physical abuse by him of Kafka, though he did prononounce the curse or "Omen" on him! So that certainly counts as psychological abuse.
Kafka has his "Theory" about his father's love for his wife, his wish to win her back but he is unable to do so. She was literally "lost" to him, and that is all she will ever be.
Is this what makes his spirit fester and become evil and pronounce the curse/Omen on his son?
Kafka's father could be seen as a driven creative person, a sculptor, who cares most about his art and his creations. Does he regard people like his sculptures, his creative projects? Yes, he could have met Miss Saeki when she interviewed him for her book. She was beautiful so he wanted her, married her, but there was nothing there that he could possess and/or control. She was already empty. (The "sort of marriage" she fell into was "pointless" she told Nakata. p. 392) Did her abuse her? Not that we know of but....Did he abuse Kafka? Maybe not physically but psychologically, yes!
But, still, dressing up like Johnnie Walker and horribly abusing innocent animals? Killing cats to harvest their souls to create a giant flute? We don't really have any inkling about that. It sounds very warped and weird. Of course, do we even know if any of that actually happened? Or was it all taking place in "Theatre of the Imagination"?
But his father's twisted spirit may have forced Kafka to do what he had to do: to get out of there and save himself. He knew that if he stayed he would be damaged--perhaps beyond repair. And yet...did Nakata become a surrogate for Kafka's spirit? Did he stand in for him? This would explain why Kafka woke up in the Shrine in Takamatsu bloody but with no memory of how or why...
4. Riddle No. 3: When Mr. Nakata lashed out and killed JW to save Mimi and Goma (yay!) was he actually killing Kafka's father? It seems so but....Does that mean JW was a twisted projection of Kafka's father?
5. Riddle No. 4: How, then, are Kafka and Nakata connected? He once said he was took the place of a young boy who shouldn't have had to be there... Nakata says: "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) Was Nakata performing a task on behalf of Kafka? To save him from acutally carrying out his prophecy?
There is also the strong contention that Nakata is some kind of conduit who channeled Komura (Miss Saeki's lover)'s spirit and delivered it into Kafka.
6. Riddle No. 5, the Huge One: is Miss Saeki Kafka's mother? There is a lot of textual evidence suggesting that she is--but since she is incapable of viewing her own conduct as either Right or Wrong she is not a fully functioning, responsible adult. Instead, she is this empty shell that used to house the young-and in-love Miss Saeki who once possessed a loving and fully functioning heart and soul.
She might have met Kafka's father when researching her book on people struck by lightning. But she has no memory of such a person. Or of having any children. And where would her daughter be? While Sakura is a possibility, many things don't fit with what we understand about her profile.
So, the evidence for Miss Saeki being Kafka's mother is highly suggestive but not compelling.
Also, we have to question whether Miss Saeki is really there, fully present when we meet her in her 50s? We know that Miss Saeki lost her spirit when her lover died; her life ended when she was 20. It was over.
After that, she can only live in the past; she cannot move forward, a painful lesson she had to learn for herself. Is she like Miu, then?
Moreover, she only has half of her shadow (like Mr. Nakata), another convincing argument that she has not been actually living or really WHOLE since she was 20.
We know that after her boyfriend, the young Mr. Komura, was murdered (around 1970? which was right around the time when the song, "Kafka on the Shore" became a hit), Miss Saeki disappeared and then resurfaced in Takamatsu 25 years later...so about 1995? Umibe no Kafuka was published in Japan in 2002. So is that the narrative present? Or maybe it's around 2000? The timeline could fit with her marrying Tamura Koichi....but why would she have no memories? So many questions....
7. Riddle No. 6. Speaking of conduits, what is the slimy white thing that came out of Nakata after he died? Where did it come from? Did it inhabit Mr. Nakata when he "went away" for three weeks when he was 9 years old? Mr. Nakata was the "only one who went inside and came back out" but what happened him doesn't think to have anything to do with the Entrance Stone and it's opening by Miss Saeki
some 25 years later? So, maybe was it inside Miss Saeki? And it transferred to Mr. Nakata when they touched at the Komura Library? Or was it inside Kafka--courtesy of his father?
8. Riddle No. 7: Another Huge One: Does Kafka actually have sex with his mother? Well, he falls in love with a ghost of Miss Saeki at age 15, and anything that happened between them was definitely a dream or in his imagination.
But also, there are scenes like at the end of Ch. 29, on the occasion of the 4th visit from the apparation or ghost, Kafka realizes is is not the 15 year old version of Miss Saeki, but the real time one. On this occasion, for the first time, they have sex but he can see that she is asleep, she is reconstructing and reproducing what happened in this very room with her lover, long ago, when she was much younger. Kafka feels like what is happening is NOT a dream, but "real life." (280) However, abruptly, the text switches into bolded text (Crow?) telling him: "And you're sucked into a time warp. Before you know it, her dream has wrapped itself around your mind."(280) Yet, on the final page of the chapter, Kafka lies there, unable to move, waiting to her the sound of her Golf starting up and leaving the parking lot...BUT he never does! (282) Pretty powerful textual evidence that whatever this is, it is not reality! It was a dream--somebody's dream--but not ordinary reality. So we have to seriously doubt whether this scene ever actually occurred.
Also, there is the fact that Kafka can "see" inside the "real" Miss Saeki the beautiful 15-year old girl she once was, just curled up inside the present day version. A young girl who at that time was so in love with a young boy (Komura) and later in this scene, when Kafka winds up pulling the 52 year-old Miss Saeki towards him and kissing her (pp. 299-300), a curious dialogue takes place:
"What are you thinking about?" Miss Saeki asks me.
"About going to Spain," I reply.
"What are you going to do there?"
"Eat some delicious paella."
"That's all?"
"And fight in the Spanish Civil War."
"That ended over sixty years ago."
"I know," I tell her. "Lorca died and Hemingway survived."
"But you want to be a part of it?"
I nod. "Yup. Blow up bridges and stuff."
"And fall in love with Ingrid Berman."
"But in reality I am here in Takamatsu and I am in love with you."
"Tough luck."
I put my arm around her.
You put your am around her. [All of a sudden an additional narrator's voice is interjected. Sounds like Crow but again, the utterance is italicized but not bolded, the usual MO.]
She leans against you. And a long spell of time passes.
"Did you know that I did this exact same thing a long time ago. Right in this same spot?"
"I know," you tell her.
"How do you know that?" Miss Saeki asks, and looks you in the eyes.
"I was there then."
"Blowing up bridges?"
"Yes, I was there blowing up bridges."
"Metaphorically."
"Of course."
You hold her in your arms, draw her close, kiss her. You can feel the strength deserting her body.
"We're all dreaming, aren't we?"
All of us are dreaming. (No quotation marks around this.)
"Why did you have to die?" [Does she think she is addressing the young Komura here?]
"I couldn't help it," you reply.
[So, someone has been interjecting and "narrating" this whole scene. Is it Crow? The text is not bolded as his voice usually is.]
Then the two of them walk back to the library, to his room, and have sex.
But, isn't it more likely than not that this entire sequence can be written off as a dream? A product of Kafka's imagination? Couldn't it all be taking place in Kafka's head? Or, that neither of the principals are really who they appear to be.
We might recall that this conversation was "prefigured" by a similar one between Oshima and Kafka just a few pages earlier (296) when they eat some paella together and talk about Spain, the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway, and the poet Lorca who died there while Hemingway did not.
So, both of these conversations invoke Hemingway's involvement in the Spanish Civil War against the Fascist Dictator Franco and refers to the novelized version of his experiences, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was made into a film starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman (1943), hence the reference to her, and to blowing up bridges.
Doesn't this suggest that all of this belongs to the realm of the imagination? To the realm of art, of film, and of human creativity? Or, likewise, to the realm of dreams?
NOTE: While they are having this conversation, Crow seems to be there, interjecting...so how can this be actual, normal reality?
This idea appeals to me because it lets us off the hook somewhat, right? We don't have to deal with the possibility that Kafka may be having sex with his mother! Let's face it, nobody wants to see that. And Murakami must know that! But he may think that it is the novelist's job to put even the unthinkable in front of the reader. After all, it's fiction, and that's what fiction does. It allows us to experience unpleasant or even unbearable things through characters created for this purpose. Our experience is vicarious; it's a way for us to put our toe in the water but we do not have to actually have to dive in and live through any of it!
The textual evidence for Miss Saeki being Kafka's mother is strong but never quite definitive or overwhelming. Nevertheless, in literature such things are a possibility. We find it in the ancient Greek play, Sophocles', Oedipus Rex, and it resurfaces here in this contemporary novel, Kafka on the Shore.
But is any of it real? After all, right in the middle of their conversation, Miss Saeki asks,
"Metaphorically?" And Kafka replies,
"Of course."
So there we are. We are constantly reminded that "Everything is a metaphor." Sounds like regular Sumire type of stuff!
BUT, the very next day, they are talking and Miss Saeki says:
"I feel like things are starting to change around me...The air pressure, the way things reverberate, the reflection of light, how bodies move and time passes--it's all transforming, bit by bit..."
She goes on:
"What happened between us in your room last night is probably part of the flow. I don't know if what we did last night was right or not. But at the time I decided not to force myself to judge anything. If the flow is there, I figured I's just let it carry me along where it wanted." (318-319)
[OK, so this is a clear acknowledgment that something DID happen between then in that room last night! But this idea of not taking a position on right or wrong is something Mr. Nakata said, too. It is the position of someone detached from the realities of ordinary, everyday life. ]
Kafka tells her he thinks she is "trying to make up for lost time."
Because he is, too.
Then that other voice (Crow's?) kicks in:
You tell her she must know who you are. You are Kafka on the Shore, you say. Your lover--and your son. The boy named Crow. And the two of us can't be free. We're caught up in a whirlpool, pulled beyond time. Somewhere we were struck by lightning. But not the kind of lightning you can see or hear. (319--again, no quotation marks in the original.)
So, this offers yet another idea: i.e., that the Kafka making love to Miss Saeki in the narrative present is NOT really "the Kafka" we know, and both parties are "caught up in a whirlpool, pulled beyond time?" Whatever is transpiring here is happening in some other realm or alternative reality.
In that moment, it seems likely that he is someone else: he is the Boy in the Painting, her lover, the young Mr. Komura. That much seems clear. So it is possible that neither Kafka nor Miss Saeki are who we think they are--they are two different people!
The Tale of Genji, and the ideas of "living spirits" and spirit possession have already been introduced into the narrative so....Are we to think that Komura's spirit somehow entered and possessed Kafka? Does Komura live on inside of Kafka? Is this what drew Kafka to the Komura Memorial Library in the first place?
It seems as though Murakami is basically throwing that possibility out there for us to consider.
In which case....technically, Kafka would not be having sex with his mother. She is making love with the spirit of the Komura boy who lives inside of him. Kafka is just the vehicle, the conduit. Does that make a difference? Biologically, or DNA-wise, Miss Saeki might still be his "mother" in this limited, technical sense. But it is much easier to accept the idea that when Kafka and Miss Saeki had sex, neither of them was really who they seem to be in terms of their consciouness and identity! And nothing is really quite real anyway.
And, of course, all of this is framed in the novel by the whole Oedipal story/myth/ancient Greek play. But remember, in the original play, because his kingdom, Thebes, was experiencing a plague, the King was told (by the Oracle at Delphi) to murder his firstborn. He passed the order on to his wife, the Queen, but, she was unable to do this either. Neither parent could. Instead, she gave the child to a servant to dispose of and he put him on a mountaintop to die from exposure. But he was found and taken to Corinth where the King and his Wife were childless. He would be raised there with no inkling of his other royal origins.
So when the child grows up and encounters first, his real father, the King of Thebes, and kills him in a quarrel (not knowing, of course, he was his father), and later, when he ascends the Throne and marries the widowed Queen (actually his biological Mother)--he had NO idea that she was his mother, or that either of these two people were his parents!! That was the whole point.
It was a Greek tragedy which is why his mother hanged herself and her son blinded himself when they learned the truth. He never lusted after his mother because she was his mother or anything like that--it was a politically expedient marriage, what any King in his situation would have done.
But somehow, starting with Sigmund Freud, all this got turned into the psychological notion that young boys, experiencing such a deep, intimacy with their Mothers as newborns, want to get rid of their fathers and take their place and BE WITH their Mothers--something very far from what the original Greek play by Sophocles was all about.
From there, Freud theorized that young boys relegate their incestuous feelings towards their mother to the unconscious. They also represses their feelings of rivalry towards their father by identifying with him instead. By holding his father up as a role model, the boy no longer has to fight him. Instead, he learns from him and becomes more like him. But, basically, these ideas led to some serious misperceptions about human nature imho!
For example, take the whole idea of "penis envy." The idea that girls envy boys because they have penises is a total crock! As feminist scholars have pointed out, young girls envy young boys not because of their penises but because they have all privileges and opportunities that are denied to young girls. So, penis envy is less about biology, than it is from a desire for fairness, parity, equal rights!
Anyway, Freud based his ideas pretty much around only one case and tried to draw universal conclusions. This raises all kinds of red flags on scientific grounds. Basically, Freud’s objectivity and the reliability of his data have been called into question, and correctly so.
Shouldn't we stick more closely to the facts of the original Oedipus story and go from there?
9. Riddle No. 8: Who or what is Mr. Nakata? He is a simpleton, a "simple" and in a sense a "pure" specimen, a human being not fettered by either logic or education. He lives in the world freely, moment-to-moment, with few, if any expectations or desires. He is never lonely or unhappy and does not experience sexual desire. In that sense, he floats through the world kind of like a Daoist Sage, never concerned with his own glory or gratification, doing what is required by circumstances, doing what is necessary. In that sense he lives out the ideal of a Daoist or Buddhist lifestyle: he does not "Attach" to the things of this world. He can see them unfold, float by, but he is not drawn in to become a part of them.
This is probably why John Updike refers to him a "Holy Fool."
And he gets along with cats as well--if not better--than he does with humans.
But he wasn't always that way, right? He became that way during the WAR, during WWII, a reality with which Murakami often seems to wrestle.
The sweet gentle Nakata became violent when confronted with the horror of Johnnie Walker. This is how one critic, Dennis Abrams, explains it:
Johnnie Walker is located in the ‘other world,’ and it would seem that the only way he can break free of the metaphysical realm and emerge into the physical is through his own death. This is why he has summoned Nakata.
His choice is an apt one, for mild-manner though Nakata appears, his self-description as a ‘man without a shadow,’ an ‘empty shell,’ makes him the ideal tool for the job. Nakata’s physical self is, finally, a mere portal, a conduit between the physical and metaphysical worlds, and into his body virtually any force of Will may lodge. However, he must be brought to the proper ‘temperature’ before this may occur. Johnnie Walker brings Nakata to his boiling point by committing acts of brutality – of war, as he himself terms it – against the very cats who form Nakata’s circle of attachment. He urges Nakata, likewise, to do his duty as a soldier:
‘You have never killed anyone, nor have you ever wished to kill anyone. You don’t have that tendency. But listen here, Mr. Nakata, there are places in our world where that kind of logic doesn’t work. There are times when no one cares much about your tendencies. You need to understand that. Like in war…When war starts, you get taken to be a soldier. When you’re taken as a soldier, you sling your rifle and head off to the battlefield, and you have to kill enemy soldiers. You have to kill a lot of them. No one cares whether you like it or not. It’s what you have to do, and if you don’t, you get killed instead.’
In this statement, Johnnie Walker reveals his true character as a spirit: he is a force of chaos, of bloodlust, the madness that possesses ordinary people in times of war. If we consider his function in terms of history, we recognize that the moments of chaos and struggle in our world are precisely those in which he has been released from the ‘other world’ to play his role on ‘this side.’ Within this context we may understand better why Nakata’s shadow chose to remain in the ‘other world’ in 1944; like Kizuki and Naoko in Norwegian Wood, and indeed like Saeki and her lover (who, I maintain, actually was Nakata’s shadow) in this novel, he sought to escape the ravages of violence that had gripped the physical world, to find a place of perfect, utopian peace. Herein we discover the cause of the inherent, incessant conflict that exists and always will exist between this spirit and Nakata’s shadow, the former seeking to foment chaos and destruction, the latter to stamp it out. This is why, in the face of Johnnie Walker’s acts of brutality – indeed, witnessing any acts of brutality – Nakata’s ‘empty vessel’ connects with its inner core and is overcome by the urge to return violence for violence.
And perhaps it all started with the teacher whose inexplicable violent outrage toward the child Nakata occurred when he found her bloody towel (from her unexpected menstruation) in the woods,, and brought them to her. She slapped him so hard he was rendered unconscious. Then there is also the connection between Nakata and Miss Saeki, companions with incomplete shadows: he can’t live anywhere except in the present; and she can’t live anywhere except in the past.
We learn that she opened the entrance stone when she was twenty years old to try to save her boyfriend but was punished for doing so: first with his death, and then with her inability to forget their love. Now, she understands why Nakata is doing the same.
She points out to him that HE is the boy looking out at the water in the painting, and when they touch hands his mind suddenly floods with memories. Ms. Saeki gives Nakata a pile of papers that she says tells the story of her life and asks him to burn them. (She restores his memories, he destroys hers.)
Though he is unable to read or write himself, Nakata intuitively grasps the importance of both, for as Saeki tries to explain to him, the process of writing is synonymous with the act of living, of existing meaningfully, something about which Nakata has no firsthand knowledge since his childhood:
‘It’s a very important thing, the act of writing, isn’t it’? Nakata asked her.
‘Yes. That’s right. It is the act of writing that is so very important. There is nothing meaningful in what has been written, in the result itself.’
‘Nakata cannot read or write, so I cannot leave any records behind,’ said Mr. Nakata. ‘Nakata is just like a cat.’ (393)
And that's one of the reasons we love him! But here we are, again, talking about the nature and importance of writing.
Stated another way, words – spoken or written – create a new reality for themselves. The act of writing, rather than what is written, is important because through this means we create a new, often tangible, reality.
And Miss Saeki is correct in stating that what is written is meaningless, but fails to add, ‘until it is read by another.’ It is the acknowledgment of another that brings the reality of all words to fruition. For Miss Saeki, however, the only person she might wish to read her words is long gone from this world (meaning her former lover, Komura), so she directs Nakata to destroy them.
The most important reality generated through words in this novel, of course, occurs for the title character, Tamura Kafka himself, whose solution to the Oedipal prophecy/curse that governs his life is to create the reality he desires by fulfilling every last detail of that prophecy as it was spoken by his father. In so doing...Kafka uses his oracle to construct a world in which he regains not only his mother and sister but a renewed (and for him, more acceptable) sense of identity.”
(Much, but not all, of the above comes from https://wildmurakamichase.wordpress.com/category/kafka-on-the-shore/)
Loftus Comment: It may have been Kafka's strategy to try and fulfill his father's prophecy but I don't think that he really performed any of it! He didn't kill his father, Nakata did. If somehow his "spirit" was involved like back in Heian days, then it was not act that he willed or consciously participated in. And when his father was killed, he wasn't really Tamura Koichi anyway! He was Johnnie Walker. So two "profections" or "phantasms" are going at it!
Kafka didn't have sex with this sister, either because he only raped Sakura in his dream....and she probably is not his sister anyway. Yes, "in dreams begin responsibilities,"so he is guilty of having an erotic dream about Sakura, but since there was no act involved, can we say that he violated her?
And for reasons suggested above, I think it was not possible for him to have sex with his mother because neither of them was sufficiently "present" for such an act to be real and have meaning. If--and it seems fairly plausible--Kafka and Miss Saeki engaged in the physical act of sex, she was no longer the person she once was (i.e., Kafka's mother) and he was not the "real" Kafka Tamura (her son) but the someone who is a conduit for young Mr. Komura. I am sure there are pieces of "counterevidence" to contest this "theory" but it's the one I've come up with after much consideration.
2. The second thing to contemplate comes from two other critics:
a) What does the shore mean for Murakami?
According to Joy Meads, Murakami describes the “shore” in Kafka on the Shore as the border between the conscious and the unconscious minds. It’s “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.”
He elaborates, “I don't read much Jung, but what he writes has some similarity with my writing. To me the subconscious is terra incognita.” Although the journey that Kafka takes is in one sense physical—he travels to Shikoku, to the library, to the woods—it is in a deeper sense an exploration of the self. Kafka’s artist father was best known for a work titled Labyrinth, a reference to mythical labyrinth of Crete: a dark, disorienting maze which Theseus was forced to navigate to slay the minotaur hidden in its depths.
In the novel, Oshima explains the origin of the concept of the labyrinth to Kafka “It was the ancient Mesopotamians. They pulled out animal intestines—sometimes human intestines, I expect—and used the shape to predict the future…So the prototype for labyrinths is, in a word, guts. Which means that the principle for the labyrinth is inside you. And that correlates to the labyrinth outside....Things outside you are projections of what's inside you, and what's inside you is a projection of what's outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you're stepping into the labyrinth inside. Most definitely a risky business.” (352)
(From "Into the Abyss" by Joy Meads)
Loftus: Sounds like everything is either a projection or a metaphor trying to connect our inner life with the outer world, our Dreams and Memories, with what passes for so-called Reality. Stuff moves from the Inside to the Outside and vice-versa. Might that be what all the stuff with Hoshino learning about Beethoven and Haydn, and Francois Truffaut's films with their "the persistent inward moving spirit" which overlap closely with the feelings, the emotions, generated by the great music composers?
And let's not forget how, nearthe end of the novel, on p. 420, when Kafka is in the cabin in the village where The Sound of Music plays on a loop on the TV, and while "Edelweiss" is playing, he grabs some milk out of the fridge and drinking it down in gulps, he is reminded of the scene from Truffaut's The 400 Blows when the young Antoine steals some milk off a porch and drinks it down. It was somehow "a sad, distressing scene." (420) Kafka recalls that he was in fifth grade at the time, and that he took the train by himself from his home in Nogata to Ikebukuro (about 20 mins) in order to see this film. So, Francois Truffaut surfaces again--same film, different veiwer this time--znd it stands out as a poignant memory for him and a further reminder for us how Film (and also Music) can have such an affect on us. And, here he is on the precipice of staying in a place where memories will all fade. Will that be okay?
We should recall Miss Saeki's plea to Kafka about the importance of "remembering" :
"I want you to remember me. If you remember me, I don't care if everyone else forgets."(440)
The ‘other world’ is present in Kafka on the Shore but not quite in the same way as it was in Sputnik. Here, it serves as a conduit by which characters may cross vast distances in this world without ever leaving. This is accomplished through the mind-body separation...the phenomenon used to open up the narrative structure to virtually endless possibilities as each character’s true identity grows less and less clear.
More from Meads:
A key to that other world is the Forest--the externalized labryinth, which serves as a conduit between worlds and as a sort of ‘changing room’ wherein the inner self may leap from one physical vessel to another Access to this forest, as always, requires a journey, yet the ‘other world’ of the forest also seems to lurk always just beside us, waiting for us to take that one step farther across the boundary into oblivion...
Not until the end of the novel, however, does Kafka finally penetrate deeply enough to discover those who actually reside in the metaphysical realm of the forest. Initially, he meets up with two soldiers – the same two who disappeared during World War II, and although the war has been over for decades, both appear exactly as they were the day they deserted from the Imperial Army. They lead Kafka into a dense part of the forest, eventually coming upon a small cluster of cabins deep in the woods where people can live peacefully untroubled by painful memories.
This is, on the one hand, liberating, as our potential readings of the text increase exponentially depending on how we choose to confront each character; at the same time, much of the complexity – and confusion – in this novel arises from its use of a kind of latticed structure, in which characters with intact inner selves are juxtaposed with those who have no inner self, as well as some who appear to have multiple inner selves. When this inherent confusion of character identity is combined with the overlay – like transparency films placed atop one another – of multiple historical eras in physical time, the tangle grows even worse. And so it goes with Murakami and his fiction.
Loftus: One has to chuckle when thinking of those poor Imperial Japanese Soldiers with their old, bullet-less weapons that are no more than symbols....or signs....and yet they say, "Symbols are important. We happen to have these rifles and soldiers'uniforms, so we play the part of sentries. That's our role. Symbols guide us to the roles we play." (402) So, they are playing roles that ceased to exist more than half a century ago...but that's not the funny part.
They ask Kafka his name and he tells them, "Kafka Tamura."
"Weird name," the tall one says.
"You got that right," the brawny one adds. (403)
So that's what is weird? Kafka's name?...Not the fact that these guys are two sentries, still outfitted in their old uniforms and outdated gear, guarding the entrance to a secret pathway to an extremely strange little village where: "Time is not much of a factor," and the inhabitants don't have any memories! There is plenty of weird going around! Kafka's name seems like the least of it!
But I do appreciate the wacky humor that sometimes surfaces in this tall tale.
b) We might also consider how, according to Richard Powers,
Murakami's fiction deploys, side by side, as part of one marvelously webbed story, distinct—if multiply connected—independent narrative frames. Some of these story frames could pass for conventional social realism. A contemporary, urban world much like Tokyo, filled with references to mass consumer culture and peopled with wonderfully realized, "realistic" characters provides the grounding for the unfolding story. But alongside this story—folded through or underneath it—fantastic, chthonic worlds ["chthonic" refers to the underground] spring up and seep into normal existence, entwining and overpowering realism in their weird tendrils.
"There's another world that parallels our own," Oshima assures Kafka in Kafka on the Shore (Knopf 2005), "and to a certain degree you're able to step into that other world and come back safely. As long as you're careful. But go past a certain point and you lose the path out. It's a labyrinth...the principle of the labyrinth is inside you [p. 326]." (42)
From Richard Powers, "The Global Distributed Self-Mirroring Subterranean Neurological Soul-Sharing Picture Show," in The Japan Foundation, comp. and ed., A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World (Stonebridge Press, 2008)
Both are excerpted at http://www.willamette.edu/~rloftus/J314%20MuraChase.htm
Oh, my! This is really rich and complicated stuff. I like the idea of the author deploying "side by side, as part of one marvelously webbed story, distinct—if multiply connected—independent narrative frames." Updike in his review finds that these "independent narratives frames" provide some "schematic rigor" to the novel that help keep it from going off the rails.
HELPFUL HINT: So reviewers like Meads, Powers and Updike all offer us avenues into this text that can help us expolore it. It's always a great strategy for a paper like this is to open with a statement that a reviewer has made, and then proceed to either disagree with it or show the reader how it was helpful to you in interpreting the work! Or, you could say you agree with some of what they argue but also have a suggestion or two of your own. If nothing else, it shows the reader that you have not only thought about the novel, but that you are aware of how some other critics have approached it, and this can lend greater credibility to your arguments.
Besides drawing upon Powers' essay, quite a few of the above arguments are adapted from Dennis Abrams' essay found at: