Fiction Mysteries are usually exciting, often intriguing. But it is also possible to reach a point of simply no longer caring what happens. This stage is arrived at surprisingly early in Kafka on the Shore.
Published in Tokyo in 2002, it is the tenth novel from Japan's major living international writer, Haruki Murakami. Presented as a quest narrative featuring a 15-year-old boy's flight from his father's home, it instead develops into an offbeat, surrealist saga involving quite a few oddballs all on the run from life, their memories and most probably themselves.
From the opening sentences, the novel reads as if written in an off key. Like a song that was never meant to be sung, it never sounds right, and these failures should not be blamed on the translation. The problems are deeper than that. Murakami is not a literary stylist; he deals in atmosphere, daring imaginative ploys and ideas. But not this time.
Two-dimensional central character and part-narrator Kafka Tamura is preparing to set off on a journey of self- discovery that may become one of survival. At no time does he sound like a young boy; instead his thoughts, and personal rituals, are those of a middle-aged man, and his sexual responses are also hardened, not tentative. As though a warrior preparing for war, Kafka prepares to leave his father's house and travel to a private library in a distant town.
It is not a spontaneous act, it has been well-planned: "My fifteenth birthday is the ideal point to run away from home. Any earlier and it'd be too soon. Any later and I would have missed my chance." In order to achieve his escape, he has worked out, increasing his physical size. His father has become the enemy.
Dad is later mysteriously murdered.
The narrator's story is sad, if unoriginal. Abandoned as a small boy by his mother, who left, taking his elder sister with him, he is the definitive loner, conversing only with his alter ego, the boy named Crow, his inner self. None of this is particularly interesting, and this, from a writer who has long balanced the abstract, the zany and the profound in original narratives that make you think almost as hard as you laugh, comes as a dull surprise.
Murakami's fiction finds its power in the energy of his imagination. There is a flatness dragging this book down; worse thathat, it reads as if Murakami, an inventive writer who has often made the surreal soar, never really engaged with a work that reads as yet another variation of a theme that has already been done - and more convincingly. Kafka is preoccupied by the thoughts of a much older man; his sexuality is expressed not in the language of a boy, but that of a man. Another story also begins early in the book, as a parallel narrative. It is an account of a wartime happening during which a young female teacher, on a mushroom-collecting trip with a class of 16 pupils, discovers the children unconscious. She runs for help.
All of this unfolds through the form of a flashback, official statement and ultimately in a letter written years after the event.
One child took a long time to wake up. That same child, the passive Nakata, is then introduced as an elderly man, a kind of holy idiot, who can converse with cats and usually refers to himself in the third person. He uses his talent for tracking missing pets. The narrative meanders along, replete with sexual banter as well as platitudes on the theme of how to survive life, and how to live well. The dialogue has an irritating archness that has never before burdened Murakami's work as it does here.
Readers of The Elephant Vanishes; Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; Norwegian Wood; his international bestseller, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was deservedly shortlisted in 1999 for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and South of the Border, West of the Sun, a beautiful, atmospheric novel sustained by Murakami's flair for philosophical mediation at its most human, will battle with this slow-moving, haphazard performance in which very little makes all that much sense, and the more fantastical elements invariably settle into the ridiculous.
It's difficult to generate sufficient interest to monitor young Kafka's adventures as we follow him to the library, where he meets the immaculately dressed and ever-helpful assistant librarian, Oshima. This young man, whose life is largely lived through the process of watching others, assists Kafka, whose search for his mother and sister apparently involves having imaginary as well as actual sex with both of them, one of whom, his mother, may or not be the enigmatic librarian and former one-hit singer, Miss Saeki, a slave to her broken heart.
Meanwhile, Nakata, having agreed to kill a character who presents himself as Johnny Walker, well-known liquor trademark and self-confessed vicious killer of cats, whose souls he steals, is on the run as a murderer.
The old man's flight, in common with that of Kafka, is really a quest. In the course of his search, the old man finds the companionship of Hoshino, a young truck driver who is not all that contented either and who recognises in Nakata reflections of his own now dead but still adored grandfather. The narrative layers run as thick as glue oozing out of control.
By the end of this part-philosophical, part-sexual fantasy endurance test stretched thin, Zen master-like buddy Oshima informs Kafka, the boy who was never a boy: "You've grown up." It is almost possible to imagine sugary theme music playing as Oshima announces, in yet another of his major statements: "Every one of us is losing something precious to us . . . lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again.That's part of what it means to be alive."
So bad a book it will probably resurface as a movie, this is a novel admirers of Murakami are best advised to avoid.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Kafka on the Shore By Haruki Murakami, Translated by Philip Gabriel Harvill, 505pp, £12.99
