The Trials of Fantasy

...Each is unaware of the other's existence, and is propelled by forces he does not quite understand...

...When Johnnie Walker returns, flute in hand, during our anticlimactic sojourn on the other side of the "entrance," he remains a menace without motive or meaning...

...There is no shortage of witty, epigrammatic psychobabble in Murakami's existential adventures...

...Or maybe a recorder...

...He is fleeing an Oedipal curse pronounced by his unloving father, a world-renowned sculptor...

...A hole in Miss Saeki's life—a gap in her memory decades long that could be concealing her marriage to Kafka's father—stretches back to the senseless death of her teenage sweetheart, who may just be reincarnated in Kafka, during the student protests four decades before...

...Kafka's belief that she is his mother might be more than "theoretical...

...And when I blow that flute it'll let me collect even larger souls___Perhaps in the end I'll make a flute so large it'll rival the universe...

...The novel places them under the cloud of three daunting, apparently unrelated, events: a supernatural flash of light that fells a flock of schoolchildren, an act of senseless violence amid the campus riots of the late 1960s, and a father's curse on his son...

...Army documents about the affair are disclosed as chapters in the novel...

...But the bloodstains that appear without explanation on Kafka's Tshirt, followed a few days later by the elder Tamura's obituary, suggest that something more sinister may be afoot...

...He embodies a new generation free of the burdens shouldered by those who came before...

...What sort of sound would it make...

...His flight is the culmination of several years of determined self-improvement, much of it in the form of weight-lifting, and counsel from an alter ego, a "boy called crow...

...Several classified U.S...

...A quest or rescue mission ensues, forcing the meek man to perform extraordinary exploits and thrusting him into a fierce confrontation with his inner self...

...Whatever lies on the other side seems, over the course of the novel, to be growing unstable, affecting the weather and threatening the real world with disaster...

...He lets these times cast a shadow on his characters, but since he shies away from delving deeply into their wounded pasts, Kafka on the Shore is itself hollow...

...Yeats, T.S...

...The lyrics to a '60s pop song, also titled "Kafka on the Shore," contain clues that may dispel their troubles and provide some answers...

...His sense of purpose diminishes once he is out of town, and with nothing else to do he searches for a good read...

...The slain man, we learn later, is actually Kafka's father...

...itmust cohere, la...

...Like many Murakami protagonists, Kafka is haunted by the absence of women from his life—specifically his mother and sister, who left too early in his childhood for him to remember them...

...He gets a lot of reading done, and we are treated to his thoughts about Hannah Arendt, Sophocles, The Arabian Nights, W.B...

...With Kafka mulling over his fate and Nakata bumbling toward Takamatsu, the book's bloated middle sags...

...These convolutions may be the workings of a 15-year-old's overactive imagination and his propensity for self-mythologizing...

...The action proceeds, as in HardBoiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), along two separate trajectories that we realize early on are bound to intersect...

...the '60s m Norwegian Wood, the bestseller that made him a household name in his native land...

...Watching the feeble-minded but good-natured Nakata take on a villain so grotesque, and nastily sarcastic, arouses a throb of squeamish sympathy for the dimwit...

...His disability, as well as his tendency to talk about himself in the third person, renders him at once poignant and comical, but traveling in his company for long stretches proves dull, especially as Nakata and Hoshino, the affable trucker who picks him up hitchhiking, slowly make their way to Takamatsu...

...This power was imparted to him as a boy during World War II in what is referred to as the "Rice Bowl Hill Incident...

...And the fantastic elements of the scene—the flute, the cats' souls, the name Johnnie Walker—at first possess an intriguing absurdity, until we realize that they are beyond our comprehension because they are nonsensical...

...The secret to Nakata's success is his ability to glean tips from stray felines by conversing with them...

...Fantasy may free the writer from the requirements of realism, but it demands its own rigors...

...Taking refuge at a private rare books library on Shikoku, he befriends the clerk, Oshima, who puts him up in his family's backwoods cabin, allowing a chance for some Waldenesque soul-searching...

...The other traveler, Satoru Nakata, is a mentally disabled retiree who was known around Nakano Ward for his odd ability to find lost cats...

...Although the rest recover without injury, Nakata remains unconscious for weeks and awakes a shell of his former self, a simpleton no longer able to read or write...

...And what did he mean by cats' souls...

...His archetypal hero is a loner, jobless or self-employed (sometimes as a writer) in a society of company men, painfully aware of approaching middle age, and single or locked in a stagnant marriage...

...Nakata and Miss Saeki, in contrast, have been scarred and "mined hollow" by Japan's recent history—World War II and the upheavals of the '60s...

...His fiction—two story collections and eight novels (two more are not available in English)—divides roughly in half into minor and major key s. Most of the stories and three of the novels— Norwegian Wood (1987), South of the Border, West of the Sun (1995) and Sputnik Sweetheart (2000)—proceed along eerie but essentially realist lines, energized by what Paul Auster calls "the music of chance...

...Like other writers who return to the same themes again and again—Alberto Moravia comes to mind—Murakami has been charged with doing variations on the same book, or two books...

...One message, though, does come across lucidly in the end...

...Kafka spends the parallel chapters playing Thoreau, until he returns to the library and becomes entangled with Miss Saeki...

...It is a tastefully selected pastiche, and Kafka is endearingly sensitive to what literature can teach him about his life, but the device fails to animate the novel...

...Both, however, still bear the unmistakable stamp of the passive Murakami misfit...

...He soon comes upon candidates for each role, and despite his young age and his resolve not to live out his father's curse, becomes sexually entwined with both...

...Nakata is as dumbfounded as we are: "Was he talking about a flute you held sideways...

...A similar aura of confusion pervades this new novel by Chandler's Japanese translator and literary disciple, Haruki Murakami...

...When all this humdrum is suddenly disrupted by some unexpected intrusion (enter a femme fatale) or abrupt departure (exit the wife or girlfriend), the hero is plunged into a sticky web of film noir-style intrigue...

...He has kidnapped many of Nakata's feline friends, and executes a few of them in front of him, claiming to be capturing their souls "to create a special kind of flute...

...Reviewed by Christian Lorentzen While working on the screenplay for the film version of Raymond Chandler's novel The Big Sleep in 1945, William Faulkner and director Howard Hawks could not figure out who murdered the Sternwood family's chauffeur...

...He enjoys a drop of Cutty Sark scotch now and then and might smoke an occasional Marlboro, but for the most part his habits are as clean as his daily routine is uneventful...

...Kafka," we learn, means "crow" in Czech...

...With Sakura, the svelte yet buxom sister figure he meets on a bus, the interaction is mostly physical and comically perfunctory...

...The boy, Kafka Tamura, is a runaway who has renamed himself after his favorite writer...

...Murakami has explored those periods before: the War in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994), arguably his masterpiece...

...His characters are repeatedly nonplussed by surreal phenomena—a flash of light in the sky that knocks a flock of schoolchildren unconscious, showers offish and leeches that fall from the clouds—and you get the sense that the author is bewildered by his own conjurings...

...More fraught with fatalistic implications is Kafka's seduction—first conducted in his dreams—of Miss Saeki, the over-50 caretaker of the library...

...Kafka emerges from his ordeal with his destiny in his own hands, "waking up in a brand-new world...

...Those looking for Franz in these pages will find only a mild distillation of the Czech author's alienation...

...They describe a flash across the sky, assumed by adult observers to come from an American B-29, that knocks out young Nakata and the rest of his class, who were on a hike in the woods...

...If you find this baffling, well, so do Murakami's characters...

...His life of modest expectations is enlivened by an armchair connoisseurship of Western culture high and low—philosophy, literature, and classical music, as well as science fiction, detective novels, rock, and jazz...

...This is a letdown after the beguiling scene that sets Nakata on his course from Tokyo...

...Kafka on the Shore the fantasy is slipshod...

...He goads Nakata into killing him to save the cat he had been hired to find...

...Eliot, tanka and haiku poetry, and, of course, his namesake...

...Besides his flute project, it turns out, Johnnie Walker has a death wish...

...Fantasia is not uncharted territory for Murakami...

...In one respect Kafka on the Shore strays from the author's accustomed subject of ripening adulthood, for here he presents us with two heroes: a teenager and an elderly man...

...Our protagonists, whom we follow in alternating chapters, set out from Tokyo's Nokano Ward and end up in Takamatsu, a provincial city on the island of Shikoku...

...In search of a lost puss, he was lured to the lair of the neighborhood cat killer, a gruesome man clad in a red coat and a black silk top hat who calls himself Johnnie Walker...

...They mention an "entrance stone" that promises to unlock another realm...

...They sent Chandler a telegram asking him to identify the killer...

...The rest, which constitute Murakami's more ambitious works, subject their heroes to nightmarish phantasmagoria and the harrowing rigors of fate...

...He responded that, for the life of him, he had no idea who did it...