Dark truths at novel's core

Geoffrey Bateman, Special To The News

Friday, January 28, 2005

Just as Kafka Tamura, the teen hero of Haruki Murakami's new novel, grapples with questions of his origins in the mysterious forests of Shikoku, an island south of Tokyo, so, too, do we find ourselves in a disorienting place as we enter this fictional world. It's a world in which humans converse with cats, philosophical prostitutes quote Hegel and fish inexplicably fall from the sky.

Sound strange? It is, but like any classic fairy tale, Murakami's novel uses the fantastic to explore the dark and profound truths at the core of human existence.

Kafka's quest is as inexplicable as it is strangely enlightening. On his 15th birthday, he decides to run away from Tokyo, where he lives with his aloof father, to escape the undisclosed metaphysical condition that plagues him. The novel hints that Kafka might be in search of his mother, who left home with his older sister when he was four, but it shrouds Kafka's reasons in vague mystery, which slowly become evident as the tale progresses.

After arriving in Takamatsu, Kafka finds a haven in a private library on an ancient estate. Oshima, a thoughtful, androgynous man who works as an assistant in the library, offers Kafka a job at the library and a room there to live in. As Kafka integrates himself into the quiet rhythms of the library's routine, he tells Oshima about the inescapable Oedipal prophecy his father repeatedly cursed him with as a child:

"Someday you will murder your father and be with your mother," Kafka says, relating his father's words.

"My father told me there was nothing I could do to escape this fate. That prophecy is like a timing device buried inside my genes, and nothing can ever change it. I will kill my father and be with my mother and sister."

This disclosure is merely one instance of many disturbing moments in this novel. The father's psychological abuse of his son is matched by the gruesome scene of his murder, which, at least on the surface, is not committed by Kafka, but by Nakata, an aging simpleton. Nakata was afflicted as a child with some mysterious illness near the end of World War II, a near-death experience that left him unable to read or remember much about himself.

Now in his 60s and able to communicate with cats, Nakata supplements his government subsidy by using his mysterious talent to find pets that neighborhood families have lost. His search for the most recent runaway leads him to Kafka's father, who has been kidnapping local cats and killing them for the magical properties that their souls contain.

A word of caution: This is not a novel for the squeamish. In this scene, Murakami describes an incident of such creepy animal cruelty that I almost put the book down.

Simply put, it is horrifying, but as you move beyond it into the larger narrative of one young man's journey into self-hood, it becomes easier to forgive Murakami's undignified lapse into B-movie-like horror writing.

Like the gruesome tales of the original Grimm's fairy tales, Murakami's prose uses this unsettling violence to grapple with the deeper metaphysical questions that haunt us, peeling away the trappings of reality to gesture to deeper mystical insights.

Yet even as the novel narrates the murder scene with a disgusting vividness, it teasingly implicates Kafka in the deed. On the evening of the murder, he wakes up near a shrine with blood on his shirt unable to remember what he did earlier in the day.

In a novel that more carefully respected the conventions of realism, there would be no way that Kafka could have been present at the scene of the crime, but Murakami deftly moves us into a different realm of fiction with ominous possibilities for the boundaries between human beings and time itself. In this fairy-tale-like world, Kafka is somehow complicit with the prophecy even as he avoids its fateful call.

Murakami also plays with the distinction between the past and present. When Kafka finds himself falling in love with a 15-year-old ghost of the woman he suspects to be his mother, a woman who visits him nightly in his room in the library, we enter further into the archetypal terrain of Murakami's tale. This apparition inevitably draws him closer to the possibility that he might fulfill the second half of his father's curse.

Yet the novel isn't as heavy-handed as it might sound, for Murakami manages to lend a playful quality to Kafka's over-determined path. As Oshima observes, ". . . Reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life."

Part of the pleasure of this novel lies in these puzzling phrases, which are meant to resonate suggestively rather than scientifically illustrate some larger truth. True, some readers may resist the post-modern inflections of this book, in which characters skirt definitive answers, instead affirming that putting their experiences into words "will destroy any meaning," but the novel's emotional core does much to temper such speculative musing.

Fans of Murakami will certainly welcome this new novel and its quirky elegance. New readers may find themselves needing time to adjust to its strange beauty, but just as the novel slowly resolves its riddling prophecy, so, too, will they be wooed by its fascinating charm.

Geoffrey Bateman teaches writing at CU Boulder and is the assistant director for the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military.