Ah, Murakami-san. I've quite liked some of your work, but the more surreal of your novels have always seemed to fall flat for me.
Kafka on the Shore is perhaps the most surreal novel of his I've read, and it's trash. I'm sure that statement will ruffle some feathers, and I'm sure some will simply retort that I 'didn't get it', but in my opinion Kafka on the Shore is utter nonsense with very little substance and almost nothing beyond some unique imagery to make it a worthwhile endeavor to carve through its near-500 pages of bullshit.
Reading Kafka on the Shore is like meeting an oddball at a party. A skinny fellow at the snack stand with dyed blue hair and wearing a smart blue blazer and tie, sipping a non-alcoholic selzer-water and eating fritos dipped in honey mustard. What a curious fellow, you think, he must be interesting! You chat him up about all manner of things; turns out he's actually a lepidopterist. Whoa, never met one of those before! He doesn't drink, nor use recreational drugs, because he believes they're poison and wants to keep his body and mind sharp. He has incredibly deep knowledge about things you've never even considered. His job is to manage inventories of cold film storage for classic TV shows, so he spends his days around golden age television cans and regales you with odd stories about Car 54 and Gunsmoke and how TV just ain't how it used to be. You take down his number and want to hang out with him to hear more about these things you've never thought about; to learn more about the dark corners of life experience you've never even considered.
You hang out with this individual a few more times, learning more and more. But eventually, something starts to bother you. Beyond these oddball pursuits, you begin to get a sense that there's just not much there. You eventually learn he simply hates the taste of beer, and he actually does smoke marijuana every so often. He doesn't actually collect butterflies yet, though he is interested in the hobby. At the moment he just likes to read a lot of Nabokov and finds the hobby a fascinating affectation, so he seeks to emulate it. His vocation is not something he's actually passionate or romantic about—he simply works part time on contract at a warehouse that happens to store these classic TV film canisters, and he's caught a glimpse of them before.
You realize he's just a guy. A regular dude. There's really not all that much special about him. He goes to work, he comes home, he pays his bills. The things he recognizes as being cool are pretty interesting, you admit, but he doesn't have such a deep, compelling knowledge of them after all.
He has nothing to say beyond, "Hey man, check this out. Isn't this pretty cool?".
That's Murakami's fiction to me.
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| Haruki Murakami |
On the surface Murakami's work seems profound, different, fresh, compelling. But when you dig a bit deeper, there's very little actual substance there. Murakami's fiction is very light on story and humanity, and very heavy on imagery that doesn't actually say much at all. The more I read his stuff, the more I suspect he's an utter charlatan, carefully crafting his fiction so that what you're reading appears to be the tip of the iceberg when, in reality, it's a cardboard prop painted blue floating along on the sea, depthless.
Writing fiction is a strange beast. In my experience, it feels almost like reverse-dreaming. Instead of sleeping and passively experiencing random imagery from your brain, you are drawing that imagery from your brain and putting it down in order to augment whatever story you're planning on telling. You're actively sorting through your own lived experience and pulling pieces from your subconscious to shape your story and your characters in a compelling, genuine manner. Murakami does this exceptionally well. He's completely honest with himself, and the imagery which seems to fascinate him is often quite enchanting. Often times the quirks he's depicting are enough to carry the scene, alone, and his workmanlike prose facilitates this perfectly by getting out of the way and letting the images take center stage.
But there's just not much else there. Murakami is a poor storyteller. His characters are frequently flat and seem to make arbitrary, nonsensical decisions. Many of his novels feature contrived conflict that isn't really all that interesting, or (as is the case in Kafka), no conflict at all. His pacing is often too blown out because he needs to give himself such space to indulge in these episodes of wading into the odd imagery and scenarios he finds so fascinating. Further—and perhaps most egregious—at times he treats his fiction as if it's little more than an avenue from which to explore his fetishistic interests; eg. young girls' breasts, or being masturbated by your sister. If you're hitting me with your kinks, you better be saying something important with them. If you're not using them as a means to a storytelling end that's going to make your fiction more thematically impactful, then you're just engaging in literary masturbation. It's leaving me feeling dirty, like the writer is pulling a Louis C.K. and sitting in the corner jacking off and I'm standing there in the locked room, forced to watch.
The more I read Murakami, the more it feels like his fiction is just a vehicle from which he imparts ideas he finds interesting. That's not a problem, really. The best writers also do this—George R.R. Martin cannot stop depicting romantic hearts stuck in cynical worlds, Ernest Hemingway is utterly entranced with the idea of death and how each mortal man and beast faces it, James Joyce is obsessed with Catholicism and Irish politics. What Murakami lacks, though, and what's so severely damaging to his work, is that there's no storytelling foundation on which all of this imagery might sit, rendering such imagery ultimately meaningless. Martin's characters are so human you'll swear they're standing right next to you, Hemingway's devastating plotting will break you for a full week, Joyce's prose and humor will make you feel the love and the passion of his characters' so deeply your chest cavity will burn with their fervor. Murakami, however, only has his imagery and not much else. His books are a set of really nice windows and skylights sitting on a lawn, with no house into which they might be installed. While they might have augmented a proper story enough to propel it into the realm of profundity, they have zero utility. Yeah, those are some great windows, but who the hell needs just a window? Alone, they're useless. Just like Murakami's imagery.
Kafka on the Shore is a nonsensical story with vast pretentions of grandeur. Murakami gives us two empty vessels to follow; an angsty, horny teenager and a developmentally disabled old man. The teenager reads as if he's written to be intelligent and interesting, though I found him mostly petulant and boring. The old man was the more likable of the two, and his quirk was something I found endearing and interesting, but ultimately not much is done with it. The real problem is that neither of these characters have any concrete conflict driving them forward. There's very little forcing them to change, and so we meander through the plot with them, never fully invested in their struggles, never fully caring about who they are. Murakami hits you with some shit, sure—an incest fetish, some shocking depictions of violence against animals, and various bits of nonsense I find impossible to take seriously (building a magic flute, oh my!)—but without a concrete story to carry it along, it all felt meaningless and silly, like a Jackson Pollock, except it's just random house paint spilled on a driveway rather than something constructed on an actual canvas.
If you enjoy the surreal and aren't a big stickler for, you know, actual storytelling? Maybe you'll like this book. I hated it and I'm eager to move on from it to something else.
Writing fiction is a strange beast. In my experience, it feels almost like reverse-dreaming. Instead of sleeping and passively experiencing random imagery from your brain, you are drawing that imagery from your brain and putting it down in order to augment whatever story you're planning on telling. You're actively sorting through your own lived experience and pulling pieces from your subconscious to shape your story and your characters in a compelling, genuine manner. Murakami does this exceptionally well. He's completely honest with himself, and the imagery which seems to fascinate him is often quite enchanting. Often times the quirks he's depicting are enough to carry the scene, alone, and his workmanlike prose facilitates this perfectly by getting out of the way and letting the images take center stage.
But there's just not much else there. Murakami is a poor storyteller. His characters are frequently flat and seem to make arbitrary, nonsensical decisions. Many of his novels feature contrived conflict that isn't really all that interesting, or (as is the case in Kafka), no conflict at all. His pacing is often too blown out because he needs to give himself such space to indulge in these episodes of wading into the odd imagery and scenarios he finds so fascinating. Further—and perhaps most egregious—at times he treats his fiction as if it's little more than an avenue from which to explore his fetishistic interests; eg. young girls' breasts, or being masturbated by your sister. If you're hitting me with your kinks, you better be saying something important with them. If you're not using them as a means to a storytelling end that's going to make your fiction more thematically impactful, then you're just engaging in literary masturbation. It's leaving me feeling dirty, like the writer is pulling a Louis C.K. and sitting in the corner jacking off and I'm standing there in the locked room, forced to watch.
Kafka on the Shore is a nonsensical story with vast pretentions of grandeur. Murakami gives us two empty vessels to follow; an angsty, horny teenager and a developmentally disabled old man. The teenager reads as if he's written to be intelligent and interesting, though I found him mostly petulant and boring. The old man was the more likable of the two, and his quirk was something I found endearing and interesting, but ultimately not much is done with it. The real problem is that neither of these characters have any concrete conflict driving them forward. There's very little forcing them to change, and so we meander through the plot with them, never fully invested in their struggles, never fully caring about who they are. Murakami hits you with some shit, sure—an incest fetish, some shocking depictions of violence against animals, and various bits of nonsense I find impossible to take seriously (building a magic flute, oh my!)—but without a concrete story to carry it along, it all felt meaningless and silly, like a Jackson Pollock, except it's just random house paint spilled on a driveway rather than something constructed on an actual canvas.
If you enjoy the surreal and aren't a big stickler for, you know, actual storytelling? Maybe you'll like this book. I hated it and I'm eager to move on from it to something else.
⭐
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