The crow in the black hole.(Book Review)

Kafka on the Shore, by Hamki Murakami; Harvill, 2004, $34.95.

HARUKI MURAKAMI became an international cult hero with his evocation of a sinister parallel universe in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. He also sold over four million copies of Norwegian Wood, his lugubrious love story which starts out depressingly and very slowly gets worse. So many tears fell from female readers that the pages became wet and warped and stuck together and Murakami became rich.

Murakami is a magic realist. This is of course just another humdrum lit crit label, but Murakami does manage to breathe some pop culture spoofiness into the genre with Kafka on the Shore. He happily gives surreal cameo roles to Colonel Kentucky and red label Johnnie Walker in top hat. But there is not much danger of you confusing Murakami with a childish comic strip. Before you know it, he has suddenly dropped you into a black hole filled with the sacred junk of 2000 years of Western philosophy and art. Audaciously he brings the Oedipus complex back to life, mixes in a super-sexy callgirl who quotes Bergson and Hegel while she does hand jobs, reactivates the age-old quest for the Absolute, has live fishes and then giant leeches raining out of blue skies, and features a strange old man with a soul of pure gold who can converse with cats.

Is this enough to give you a severe case of indigestion? Well, with another author, perhaps. But Murakami's narration moves along calmly and without clutter or artifice. The most peculiar things happen quite naturally. Mysticism and the supernatural so infuse the characters' souls that the bizarre becomes everyday, indeed almost Kafkaesque.

In Kafka on the Shore Murakami is very interested in fate or fatedness in the sense of Greek classical tragedy. This is quite distinct from the Shakespearean sense of fate which grows out of a fatal flaw in the hero's character. But in Greek tragedy it is often the protagonist's heroic excess which calls forth the wrath of the gods or the inexorability of some external and fearful fate. Murakami mixes in a touch of Buddhist reincarnation as a soother, or perhaps it comes from Pythagoras and the transmigration of souls.

Kafka on the Shore takes its name from two sources. First, Franz Kafka is the spiritual inspiration of the alienated fifteen-year-old boy runaway, who virtually lives in libraries in order to escape the attention of his hated and neglectful father. The boy believes that Kafka's strange torture- and learning-machine in the story "In the Penal Colony" is an existential symbol for enlightenment through suffering and out of reverence he resolves to re-christen himself Kafka, or in full Kafka Tamura. Second, Kafka is the eponymous hero of a love song composed by the Oedipal mother-figure, Miss Saeki, when she lost the great and only love of her life when she was fifteen. The song became top of the pops at the time, though I found this difficult to believe, as it is fairly obscure and elusive.

Are you confused? Excellent. Murakami wouldn't want it any other way. A certain confusion at the outset is needed to give you the jolt to start you on your pilgrimage, in which you will tag along at the heels of Kafka Tamura. Once you suspend your disbelief and identify with the yearnings and the sacred missions of the twin protagonists, namely the fifteen-year-old Kafka and the eighty-five-year-old sacred simpleton Nakano, you will never have another dull moment. You will never be bored. Things are fated to happen to you, meaningful things. Your fellow characters will never ignore you or even maintain the usual formal barriers of distant courtesy and indifference. Your intense field of gravity will irresistibly sweep them into ...