Kafka on the Shore: An Analysis, Pt. 2

Kafka on the Shore provides us with several metaphors, along with ideas such as duality and the condition of the spirit. But what does it mean?

In this final part of the analysis, I am going to get to essence of what I think Murakami is trying to achieve in ‘Kafka’. ‘Kafka’ is about In my opinion, one of the most prevalent topics in ‘Kafka’ would be the search for one’s purpose. And, instead of having one major lesson, the book is written in such a way that there are several perspectives of purpose portrayed.

One such perspective would be the idea that one might find that purpose within themselves, and know it to be as such. After a lifetime of woodworking, Nakata finds the urge within himself to track down Miss Saeki and find the other half of his shadow. Helping to open and close the entrance stone was his purpose, and soon this purpose was handed down to Hoshino, which brings forth the second perspective: purpose comes from critical decisions. If Hoshino had not decided there and then that it is worth sacrificing his job for Nakata’s quest, he would not have achieved any sort of fulfilment, and eventually, because of that decision, his purpose was brought forward to him by a speaking cat, in the form of killing the white blob and closing the entrance stone. The Archduke Trio by Beethoven is a symbol of this critical change, as the nature of the music contrasts with the typical sleaziness and roughness associated with truckers.

The third perspective would be the idea that purpose, once lost, cannot be regained. This can especially be seen in two characters: Kafka’s father, and Miss Saeki. Kafka’s father lost all sense of purpose, instead focusing on sculpture, symbolic reflections of his hollow body. He soon made killing cats and enlarging his flute of souls his purpose, an empty and unfulfillable purpose that made him accept death with ease. Once Miss Saeki’s lover died, her purpose of existence died right there, and her new purpose was to experience the love of her lover on more time, leading her to open the entrance stone in the first place. However, when faced with the hollow body of her new husband and the gravity of her actions, she fled to manage the library, eventually living a purposeless life, waiting for death.

The fourth perspective would be the idea that purpose is a part of who we are. Purpose is the greatest thing that defines us from everything else, for without purpose, we are merely physical shells. Murakami portrays this by linking purpose to spirit. Losing one’s spirit is the same as losing one’s purpose, as can be seen from Kafka’s father and Miss Saeki. In the end, this is what the whole book is about. It is about Kafka struggling with his identity and purpose, ultimately accepting who he is and determined to start his life again anew, with a new perspective.

There are two really apparent motifs in the novel: time (as well as age), and memory. Kafka is “the toughest fifteen year old in the world” but he looks seventeen. Miss Saeki has a part of her spirit walking as a fifteen year old, but the remainder of her broken spirit is fifty. The philosophy major makes a remark regarding the impossibility of the present, as the present is just the past eating into the future. And within the spirit world, time does not exist. The motif of time and age is to show that time has no place in the search for one’s purpose. Purpose violates all boundaries of time and age, and to purpose, time does not exist.

This is in contrast to the motif of memory. Memory is oftentimes in direct violation of one’s search for purpose. Several characters in the novel are weighted down by memory, most notably Miss Saeki. It’s the inability to forget her lover’s death that ultimately resulted in the destruction of any future relationship and the inability to regain her purpose. Kafka’s inability to forget about his mother and sister’s departure made him overthink situations, and ultimately pulled him down a dark path when he finally started to love Miss Saeki. The Komura library with all its books is a symbol for memory. When present day Miss Saeki manages it, she is burdened by it. This is in contrast to the empty library of the spirit world. To spirit and purpose, there is no memory. There is only the future. Or at least, that’s what the novel is trying to argue.

Kafka, our main character, makes the critical decision to run away from home, thereby creating his own path and purpose. However, he is unable to find out what that purpose it, and is instead weighted down by his memories until he enters the spirit world. He falls in leave with a living spirit because of his own memories, the constant bite of his prophecy and the part of Miss Saeki’s lover’s spirit that was still within him. In the spirit world, he is shown a cabin without books, in contrast to Oshima’s cabin in the human world. Fifteen year-old Miss Saeki visits and fully interacts with him in the spirit world, and time on his watch has stopped. At that moment, he was about to decide that this is his meaning, that this is his purpose. Miss Saeki was everything to him and staying with her became his meaning. Meanwhile, Nakata met Miss Saeki, and Miss Saeki presented Nakata with a whole documentation of her life, asking him to burn it promptly. These papers represent her memories, and through burning them, she has decided to finally let go of the memories and lay her spirit to rest. She dies, at peace, and the remainder of her spirit goes into the spirit world and tells Kafka to turn back. She’s effectively telling Kafka that his life was not destined to be as such, that his original spirit has a greater meaning beyond staying with a dead soul. When Kafka remarks that he did not know what to do next, she told him to look at the painting, at ‘Kafka on the Shore’. As mentioned in Part 1 of this analysis, ‘Kafka on the Shore’ is a symbol for the search of one’s purpose, with the boy in the painting looking out into the distance for the ‘pendulum that swings the world’, the essence of the everyday that pushes everyone forwards.

By telling Kafka to look at this painting, the book has achieved its primary purpose: to tell the reader to keep on searching for purpose, as a life without purpose is not a life lived. Purpose can come from within or from others, like Nakata and Hoshino respectively, and the first step in achieving one’s purpose is the right decision at that critical juncture. Once you get hold of this purpose, do not lose it, for you can never get it back again.

And, with that, adiós.

 

Kafka on the Shore: An Analysis, Pt. 1

“Kafka on the Shore” was released by Haruki Murakami in 2002, and, like many of his novels, it is a cryptic page-turner that doesn’t end with all the answers.

Having recently finished reading the book, I was left incredibly confused. There were so many things left unexplained, including all the mysterious supernatural phenomena, all the odd extra characters and the unnumbered chapter towards the end. After thinking on it for a few days, I think I have managed to figure out exactly what’s happening and what it all means thematically. This post will tackle the explanation aspect, while my next post will tackle the thematic analysis part. Needless to say, there will be spoilers ahead, so don’t read any further if you haven’t read the book (which, by the way, you really should.) Also, all of this is just my interpretation and I don’t claim to be a professor of literature or anything of that sort.

So let’s kick things off.

The first thing is to identify what the gimmick of the whole story is, the idea that facilitates symbolism, plot and the portrayal of themes. In ‘Kafka on the Shore’, it’s clearly one thing: spirit. Or rather, the duality and separation of the spirit and body. Spirits can leave the body as living spirits, enter other bodies and leave the world entirely. In ‘Kafka on the Shore’ , which I’ll be calling ‘Kafka’ from now on, most of the main characters don’t have a normal spirit to body relation, and that is what pushes the story forward.

Another thing to identify is the function of the entrance stone. One possible interpretation is that the entrance stone is what, when opened, enables spirits to travel from the human world to the spirit world. This means that at the end, when Kafka exits the entrance to the spirit the world, it is right before Hoshino closes the entrance stone in Colonel Sander’s apartment.

Now what I’ll do is briefly look at each character and explain the state of their spirit.

Nakata does not have a full spirit, and instead has one so irrevocably damaged it cannot be retrieved in the human world. This is why he always feel as if he is not what he was before the ‘accident’, and why only when he died could Hoshino wonder whether in death he would go back to being the normal Nakata. The most likely explanation for the damage of his spirit is that, during the ‘accident’, his teacher beat him so badly that his young body suffered unrecoverable brain damage. He lost everything he was before. He lost his entire identity, and as such his spirit itself was almost entirely destroyed. When faced with Johnnie Walker, the spirit of Kafka is what possessed him as a living spirit, and made him murder Johnnie Walker.

Johnnie Walker, which we find out to be Kafka’s father, is a man with an extremely damaged and twisted, minuscule spirit. One possible reason is that the lightning strike changed his outlook on life to the point where he lacked any sort of spirit. In an attempt to express this lack of spirit, he first became obsessing with sculpture, empty bodies with no spirit. Eventually, in an attempt to gain back his spirit, he started to murder cats. The ‘flute’ of souls is simply the sound of death, as was shown in the chapter “The Boy Named Crow”. For every cat he killed, he managed to find his own spirit, but it was dark and twisted, and it was this spirit that entered the spirit world upon his death, after which the boy named Crow killed his phantom spirit once in for all.

Kafka is born with two spirits, or rather one and a half spirits. With the entrance stone opened by Miss Saeki, he was able to obtain the spirit of her lover back from the spirit world, and the spirit was able to find a body to reside in through Kafka, Miss Saeki’s own son. However, Kafka’s true spirit remained in him, and this is what is referred to as the boy named Crow. This is why, in the unnumbered chapter, Kafka’s spirit, represented in its corporal form of a crow, lunged at and kill the twisted spirit of Kafka’s father. The spirit of Miss Saeki’s lover that remained within him is what compelled him to want to sleep with Miss Saeki, his own mother, despite his own body and spirit not wanting to. This is probably why at those moments, the boy named Crow takes over narration, narrating everything as a third person, unnaturally and painfully.

Miss Saeki, much like Nakata, is a half-spirit. But since she didn’t suffer the same mental handicap Nakata did, she was able to fully understand her lack of spirit, and she lived her life empty, a “hollow body”, with only half a shadow. This destruction of the spirit came when her lover died when they were twenty. The part of her spirit that died and moved on took the form of a fifteen-year old version of her, while the second part remained until Nakata meets her at the end of the book, after which it went to the spirit world and urged Kafka to come back to the human world. When faced with the tragedy of her lover’s death, she opened the entrance stone and guided his spirit outwards, eventually, unintentionally, planting it inside her own son.

Colonel Sanders is an extremely odd character, being described as merely a concept and nothing more, but yet having a human secretary (who could also possibly be the Philosophy major). It’s important to note that Colonel Sanders is described as a concept and not as a spirit, and he also mentioned that, since he is a concept, he cannot be killed. Spirits can be killed, as shown in the unnumbered chapter. So this can only mean that Colonel Sanders it the tangible, physical representation of an abstract concept. I would argue that what Colonel Sanders represents is the notion of the Living Spirit. He is unable to do anything physical or with substance. And his main job is to ‘check the accounts’, that is, to correct the flaws in the passing and possession of spirits. This is why he was so keen on helping Hoshino and Nakata on their quest. If so, then what’s the deal with the Philosophy major?

“And by exchanging self and object, we can project ourselves onto the other and gain self-consciousness”

This quote strongly suggests that the knowledge of one’s own existence is a direct result of one’s awareness of another’s awareness of oneself. The purpose of this philosophical idea in ‘Kafka’ is to suggest that only through the recognition of dualities of spirit and body can one attain self-consciousness. The spirit and the body are subject to themselves and object to each other, and with the union and recognition of both does self-consciousness arise. This leaves me to conclude that Colonel Sanders is the physical representation of the idea of the Living Spirit, which has to provide recognition of and for the corresponding body for self-consciousness, true knowledge and peace to be achieved. The secretary or Philosophy major, whether the same person or not, are probably servants to this idea, knowing that something is wrong with the spirits of the world and trying their best to correct it.

Oshima, as a transgendered gay man, is a living, walking metaphor of duality. In him is the duality of man and women both in spirit and in his body. And throughout all his appearances, he constantly reminds us of the importance in recognising these dualities in our quest for purpose and fulfilment.

Kafka on the Shore is the boy in the painting that was painted by a traveling artist that visited the Komura library when Miss Saeki and her lover were very young, and it is also the subject of Miss Saeki’s song “Kafka on the Shore”. In the novel, Kafka has claimed himself to be Kafka on the Shore, and Miss Saeki has labelled Nakata when he met her as the Kafka on the Shore. I feel that Kafka on the Shore is the representation of the search of one’s lost spirit and one’s own meaning, as the song states that he seems to be ‘thinking of the pendulum that moves the world’, the regularity and momentum of spirit and body that keeps everything in balance, that keeps the ‘account’ in ‘check’. Kafka thinks he is Kafka on the Shore as, because of his union with Miss Saeki, Kafka thinks that he has found his life’s purpose and meaning. However, Nakata is truly Kafka on the Shore, as through his gut feelings and impulses, he has truly managed to find his purpose, and the other half of his shadow. In the end, Miss Saeki instructed Kafka to look at the painting in order to remind him to constantly search for his true purpose, as being with her was definitely not what it was.

So now to discuss the more supernatural aspects of the novel. First would be the mass hypnosis of the children in the forest during World War II. Perhaps it was because of the rhythmic beating of the young Nakata. Or perhaps it was because, facing the trauma of the abuse of Nakata, they went into a state of shock, and the spirits of all the children entirely left their bodies. Without the projection of the self on the other and vice versa, there was no self-consciousness, and the children were immediately stuck in limbo, alive but not alive. The raining fish and leeches is inexplicable, but, just like Colonel Sanders, it is a metaphor made physical. It might be a metaphor for the then instability of the spirit world, with spirits being where they shouldn’t be, some unable to be at peace. Nakata talking to cats would probably be explained by his damaged, broken half-spirit being close to that of a cat’s, and when Nakata finally dies, before the entrance stone is closed, the remainder of his spirit goes into Hoshino, enabling him to speak with cats and kill the white blob that emerged from Nakata. As for the white blob, it’s the physical representation of the consciousness and will of Kafka’s father/Johnnie Walker, the one that makes him capable of causing leeches to rain. The destruction of the white blob finally destroys his presence in the human world, thereby facilitating the death of his spirit in the spirit world, as only with his will destroyed can the boy named Crow finally end his father and fulfil the prophecy.

At the end of the story, Miss Saeki and Nakata meet, and Miss Saeki’s spirit finally achieves peace. Nakata, having found the other half of his shadow, has also achieved peace, and dies soon after. After Miss Saeki’s remainder spirit visits Kafka in the the spirit world and encourages him to leave, Kafka goes through, and probably left the part of the spirit of Miss Saeki’s lover behind to be with the fifteen-year old part of Miss Saeki’s spirit. And then he woke up to a bright new day and a brand new him.

And that concludes the explanation section of this analysis. Coming up next: what does all of this mean for the reader? And what can we take away from this metaphor-filled novel of the new century? Until then, so long.

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And the years have passed. I now write on rohanav.com.