How Kafka Tamura Reconciles His Fate: Haruki Murakami’s "Kafka on the Shore" (Part 2)

While residing in the library, Kafka sees the “ghost” of a young Miss Saeki in his room one night, and falls madly in love with her. His descriptions of the phenomenon are full of hyperbolic contradictions:

Her features are gorgeous, but it’s not only that. She’s so perfect I know she can’t be real. She’s like a person who stepped right out of a dream. The purity of her beauty gives me a feeling close to sadness – a very natural feeling, though one that only something extraordinary could induce (235).

After witnessing the ghostly manifestation, Kafka says his head is “too full of that enigmatic girl,” and that “a strange, terrific force unlike anything [he’s] ever experienced is sprouting in [his] heart, taking root there, growing” (236). This is a clear sign that the image of Miss Saeki has already found a way into his young heart.

A remarkable coincidence in the form of a popular song sung by Miss Saeki entitled Kafka on the Shore and a painting of a young man by the sea, further alerts the reader to the fact that Kafka is fated to meet Miss Saeki. When examining the painting, Kafka notes that in one corner of the sky “there are some sharply outlined clouds, and the largest looks sort of like a crouching sphinx” (247).

The Sphinx, as the reader is probably aware, is closely associated with Oedipus’ legend. When Oedipus defeated the deadly Sphinx by solving the riddle (“What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?”), he became king of Thebes and unknowingly married his own mother Jocasta, thus fulfilling the prophecy.

Kafka is also almost certain that the painting of the young man sitting on the shore was what inspired the title of the song: “I suspect Miss Saeki used it since in her mind the mysterious solitude of the boy in the picture overlapped with Kafka’s fictional world. That would explain the title: a solitary soul straying beside an absurd shore” (247).

All the signs that Kafka is destined to find his way to Miss Saeki are gathered here in this room. His fate overlaps with that of Oedipus Rex, and his solitariness, also found in the young man in the painting, is Kafkaesque and borders on the absurd.

In Chapter 30, Kafka tells Miss Saeki his theory of her possibly being his mother:

“My father was in love with you, but couldn’t get you back. Or maybe from the very beginning he couldn’t really make you his. He knew that, and that’s why he wanted to die. And that’s also why he wanted his son – your son, too, to murder him. Me, in other words. He wanted me to sleep with you and my older sister, too. That was his prophecy, his curse. He programmed all of this in me” (314).

This revelation neither surprises nor repulses Miss Saeki. Her reaction is one of non-plussedness; she says she cannot give Kafka a definite answer as to whether she has any children. She calls Kafka’s theory “speculative,” but does not dispute it. Miss Saeki and Kafka do consummate their love, and that leads to the fulfilment of yet another prophecy.

Everything comes full circle when Kafka also has sex with his (possible) sister, Sakura, in a “dream” (396). When she commands him to stop, he refuses and says “it’s too late.” The reason he gives is that he “decided” it is too late. Here the reader arrives at another crucial moment. What follows next is an address by the boy named Crow:

You don’t want to be at the mercy of things outside you anymore, or thrown into confusion by things you can’t control. You’ve already murdered your father and violated your mother – and now here you are inside your sister. If there’s a curse in all this, you mean to grab it by the horns and fulfil the programme that’s been laid out for you. Lift the burden from your shoulders and live – not caught up in someone else’s schemes, but as you. That’s what you want (398).

Kafka “rapes” his sister because he wants to take charge once and for all, having had enough of confusion and helplessness. He is under the impression that if he were to “grab it by the horns,” things would go his way. This, the reader finds out later, is a mistaken view. In Chapter 41, the boy named Crow speaks again:

… so you did everything that was prophesied about you. But nothing’s really over. You didn’t overcome anything. That curse is branded on your soul even deeper than before … That curse is part of your DNA. You breathe the curse, the wind carries it to the four corners of the earth, but the dark confusion inside you remains. Your fear, anger, unease – nothing’s disappeared. They’re all still inside you, still torturing you (416).

This is yet another revelation that makes Kafka stand still. His aggression, which he thought had served him well, is in fact counter-productive, and has made the curse worse than before. The boy named Crow also prophetically says: “There’s no war that will end all wars.” He tells Kafka that he must “overcome the fear and anger inside … let a bright light shine and melt the coldness in [his] heart” (417). In other words, fear and anger can never mend the hurt inside Kafka. What he needs to learn to be “the toughest 15-year-old on the planet” is to get his self back, to accept everything he is – faults and all.

All page numbers refer to the 2005 Vintage edition.

Link to Part 3: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/02/how-kafka-tamura-reconciles-his-fate_26.html