How Kafka Tamura Reconciles His Fate: Haruki Murakami’s "Kafka on the Shore" (Part 1)

With Kafka on the Shore (海辺のカフカ, 2003), Murakami delivers what is arguably his most crowd-pleasing work. It has all the ingredients that make up a great thriller; it has a sympathetic teenage anti-hero who is at odds with the world; it has an engrossing parallel plot that never loses steam; it proffers more than enough head-scratching, eyebrow-raising mysteries any Murakami fan could wish for. To top it all off, it is also a deeply philosophical work that tackles complex subjects such as identity and Fate.

The novel’s intriguing title naturally calls to mind the Czech writer Franz Kafka, author of The Trial and the short story Metamorphosis, immortal symbol of twentieth-century Existentialist angst. When the novel opens, it is instantly clear to the reader that Kafka, a boy who has just turned fifteen, is a troubled soul. He has an internal voice called “the boy named Crow” (“Kafka,” incidentally, means “crow” in Czech) that he converses with, and he quickly comes to the conclusion that he is compelled to run away from home. What Kafka has in mind is erasure. He is ashamed of who is, of his looks:

I can do my best not to let any emotions show, keep my eyes from revealing anything, bulk up my muscles, but there’s not much I can do about my looks. I’m stuck with my father’s long, thick eyebrows and the deep lines between them. I could probably kill him if I wanted to – I’m definitely strong enough – and I can erase my mother from my memory. But there’s no way to erase the DNA they passed down to me. If I want to drive that away I’d have to get rid of me (9).

Immediately after these fatalistic thoughts, he says: “There’s an omen contained in that. A mechanism buried inside me.”

This passage paves the way for the rest of the novel. It tells us that the fictitious Kafka is a creature of alienation akin to the actual Kafka, and lays down the foundation for the weighty subject of Fate in the Sophoclean tradition. It crosses Kafka’s mind that he could “probably” kill his father (Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex kills his father despite human intervention), and erase his mother – who left him and his father when he was still a child – from his memory (Oedipus Rex unwittingly marries his own mother – even though he is aware of the prophecy). When Kafka says “it” contains an omen, and that there is a “mechanism buried inside [him],” the reader quickly catches on that Murakami will be taking him down the Greek tragedian route.

The Greek notion that our lives are governed and directed by Fate dominates Kafka on the Shore. In a seemingly casual conversation with the hermaphroditic Oshima about books, Kafka speaks of celebrated Japanese author Natsume Soseki’s The Miner, in which all the hero does is “watch things happen and accept it all”:

He has no sense that it was something he decided to do himself, or that he had a choice. He’s … totally passive. But I think in real life people are like that. It’s not so easy to make choices on your own (114).

Kafka identifies with the hero because he, too, knows the difficulty of making choices in a life that is not entirely in his control. Though far from being passive like Soseki’s hero, Kafka is still caught in a web he cannot free himself from, a web whose entire design he cannot fully see.

In a later conversation with Oshima, more emphasis is placed on the subject of Fate. Oshima has this to say: “From my own experience, when someone is trying very hard to get something, they don’t. And when they ‘re running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them…” (164-5).  He then mentions Cassandra, the queen of Troy whose prophecies no-one believed, and khoros, the chorus present in Greek plays that explains the characters’ feelings and sometimes act as their guide. Oshima wishes he had his own chorus. A cogent point is then made about “ominous prophecies”: “Because reality’s just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life” (166). This indicates to the reader that life is in fact a series of dark prophecies, and that Kafka’s attempt to escape from his Oedipal fate may just be an exercise in futility. It is at the end of this conversation that Oshima offers Kafka a position in Miss Saeki’s library, bringing him closer to the fulfilment of things prophesied. Oshima, being a hermaphrodite, is meant to be an allusion to the other hermaphrodite – Tiresias in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the blind seer who knew of Oedipus Rex’s tainted origin and compelled him to face the truth of who he really was.

Soon after the reader learns that Kafka’s father is brutally murdered (in a fashion mirroring Nakata’s adventure with cat-killer Johnny Walker). Having been unconscious himself, Kafka cannot explain his whereabouts during the time of the murder. The suggestion here is that even though it was Nakata who had plunged the knife into Johnny Walker, it might very well be possible that it was Kafka who had committed the patricidal act.

This, too, has been foreshadowed by the author in an earlier chapter. When Kafka was in the cabin reading a book about Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, he had come across a pencilled note Oshima had written in the book:

It’s all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It’s just as Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibility. Turn this on its head and you could say that where there’s no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just as we see with Eichmann (141).

The reference to W. B. Yeats’ poem “Responsibilities” is pertinent as it forces Kafka to reflect on his own sense of responsibility. He is of the opinion that he cannot be held responsible for something he cannot remember, but now he knows there is a counter-argument: “It doesn’t matter whose dream it started out as, you have the same dream. So you’re responsible for whatever happens in the dream. That dream crept inside you, right down the dark corridor of your soul” (142).

Kafka then, rather ominously, compared himself to Eichmann, who was “caught up … in the twisted dreams of a man named Hitler.”

This earlier passage demonstrates clearly that one is responsible even while one is dreaming (or unconscious). The fact that Kafka cannot remember where he was or what he did when his father was murdered does not absolve him of the crime.

Kafka, like Oedipus Rex before him, has already fulfilled one of the prophecies: that of the killing of his father. The next prophecy – sex with his own mother – is on the brink of becoming a reality.

All page numbers refer to the 2005 Vintage edition.

Link to Part 2: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-kafka-tamura-reconciles-his-fate_17.html