“If you remember me, I don’t care if anyone else forgets.”
Is there a way out of the subconscious tunnels our fate puts us into? We try and we succeed in running away from our fate, but what do we want deep down, belonging, love, or an escape? Is escapism the ultimate answer or does it, itself give birth to this inseparable loneliness inside?
I first heard of Murakami and this book while aimlessly scrolling on you-tube. I don’t know if this was fate or some universal conspiracy, but I gave in and read this particular book. It took me almost a week and I am glad and unimaginably grateful. This book is like a metaphysical storm, its waves crashing at your unconsciously fettered beach. Time and memories, two of the most important concepts that also have a regular occurrence in Murakami’s works, this book encapsulates them both. This it does in such a magical way that you as a reader are rendered helpless to the beauty of the familiar and relatable metaphors.
This story is about two people with their own individual lives away from each other slowly converging, the unfurling destiny that keeps intertwining their fates together, on to a journey of self-discovery. Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old runaway, who is under the weight of an Oedipal curse tries to find his own solace away from his father, a sculptor, and an old man named Nakata. Nakata has his own troubled past, and an uncanny ability to converse with cats. I never wanted to be able to talk to cats that is until I delved deep into Nakata’s aloof and magnetic core. He had an urge to find lost cats and take them back to their homes. When destiny brings him and Kafka together the events unfold, and it is something that catches me off guard, Nakata finds himself gravitating towards Kafka for unfathomable reasons. No amount of words weaved together will be enough to effectively capture the eeriness complemented by the oddity of the essence and importance of time and memories in this piece of literature.
When I try to capture the essence of the story, I realize that it is incoherent and follows no fixed pattern, it takes us through various lives and origins and at times it does get messy. Yet that’s the beauty of it, it gives you your own space for interpreting it in any way you want without the imposition of a fixed perspective. Kafka on the shore is a metaphor, a way of interpreting what human emotions and urges mean to any of us.
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn.
Why?
Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So, all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.”
And we do find ourselves, coming out of this symbolic, metaphoric and meta-physical storm, beautifully bruised by the inescapable beauty of surrealistic painting that Murakami does. Of course, this makes you cry and it feels like a thousand razor blades cutting through your bare skin at times, you cry and smile and that makes it an unforgettable journey of a multi-dimensional narrative.
“You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.”
“And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm is all about.”
I understood the mystical importance of memories. We keep a person alive through our cumulative memory of their existence in our life. How they were for us, to us and how they made a home in our cobwebbed hearts.
“Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.”
Some people find love at the most irrelevant times, and they want to freeze it, and cherish it forever. The moment is so fragile and fleeting, the relevance of stories of how we reach and where we reach, the unfolding fate. The new and cherish-able relationships made along a profound journey where you never know what’s waiting for you or what you might come across, something that carries a hidden potential to unleash sorrow in your life.
Magical realism is inculcated in between to demonstrate the eeriness and the bizarre reflectivity of Murakami’s own head. When the story sees the entry of Oshima and Miss Saeki, and how it starts bending towards the curve of love. Kafka and Miss Saeki’s love story never failed to amaze me, at times it made my heartbreak, and on other occasions it filled me with hope and warmth. I could write more and more about the nuanced aesthetic of this book, but I am restrained by an urge to provoke you enough and catch you inside this mysterious aura. Encapsulated enough to discover the detailed intricacy of Murakami’s work and be in awe of it forever.
As the book starts to end, the surrealist waves come crashing on to you, Haruki Murakami in this book didn’t let go of the inevitability of incoherence emanating from parallelly converging stories of remembrance, loss, and melancholy. A perfect mixture of surrealism, magic realism, pop culture, nuanced mundane events, provide the characters a roller-coaster ride, a kafka-esque journey of love, hate, anger, betrayal, sexuality and ultimately grief and us as a readers get a perfect story to sink our teeth into. The timely hallucinatory landscapes, thought provoking bindings, and paradoxical commentaries keep you hooked to the pages.
As I conclude this, I do want to tell you that when you decide to give this book a try and come across the part where, Miss Saeki’s song comes, listen to this amazing piece “The calm I feel with you” by Comet Blue. I reckon this is what her song would sound like if it ever exists. I hope you do decide to give in.
“It sounds a little like a fairy tale. But it’s no fairy tale, believe me. No matter what sort of spin you put on it.”