A Review
Every Murakami I’ve got my hands on has left me wondering for days at length, making me think if there are other minds out there that can conjure delusive landscapes to lure readers the way he can. Haruki Murakami weaves his stories in strange ways with recurring characters (e.g. the Sheep Man, seen in more than two novels) and unusual occurrences (e.g. rainstorms with fish and leeches falling from the sky). In almost all his stories, there is a noticeable pattern of characters travelling through their subconscious or between parallel worlds, bringing us to the book in discussion: Kafka On The Shore.
The story follows a teenage boy named Kafka Tamura, who is a runaway looking to escape a binding prophecy, or curse if you may; an ageing man named Nakata, who has an ability to converse with cats ever since he woke up from a coma caused by ‘a UFO attack’. The two are heavily unrelated but when their fates meet by odd means, it opens doors to an odyssey that involves a murder, the discovery of a forest housing soldiers who haven’t aged since the Second World War, and trips to an alternate reality where one leaves behind a piece of ‘their souls’ in order to find a mere purpose to their life.
Although he doesn’t use ornate words, or elaborate phrases, Murakami has the ability to draw readers in by creating illusive worlds where nothing is predictable and reality seems more than a few miles away. He picks universal emotions of loss, joy and melancholy to spin together unexpected tales that makes you dwell on these stories more than necessary. Murakami has always been obscure with the ultimate themes of his novels, stating that the key to understanding his seemingly mundane yet complex works is to ‘read them several times until all the hidden riddles form one vital solution’.
Even if Murakami looks a little too elaborate for you, I say, go for it! Never mind the mind-bending concepts or the indefinite answers to your questions, his stories make for an interesting, hard-to-put-down read that will leave you turning pages until the wee hours of the morning. As an answer to the opening line of this article, I’d like to think there’s no one who writes like him, Murakami is one of a kind.