April 4, 2021
日
Today I woke up late. When I peeked out the window the sky was already a smooth baby blue, with shy patches of light orange coming from the east. My legs still ache a little. The muscles groaned when I directly put them to use to get off the bed and fetch some water. It was the leftover from two days before. I went hiking to a mountain just outside the city, about two and a half car ride going up steep asphalt road. The hike was not as challenging as I imagined, though I get to explore the forest area more leisurely, surmounting up to three hours walk. I came because I was tired looking at barren city landscape with piss poor green space, and brown ricepaddy field post-harvest that surrounds my house four compass points. My body miss being within tall tree trunks, buried under green canopies, listening to the sound they made when they were blown by high altitude wind. They sounded like a wild river, crisp and smooth at the same time.
In structure, Kafka on the Shore opened with two separate stories. As far as I’m at right now, I caught some clues on the connection between the two, but no idea on how they would merge or cross path. One thing for sure it’d probably happen through a dizzyingly bizzarre twist. I can’t say whether this is what got Murakami’s readers attached to his books as I’ve only had read three titles, but it worked on me. From the enchanting first-person plural perspective of a CCTV in After Dark, to Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage that I still have no clue what it’s trying to tell.
The first story, in order of appearance and not priority, is about a teenager who named himself Kafka. He ran away from home and at the part of the book I'm at he found himself living in a small library managed by a mysterious Miss Saeki, and Oshima, an intelligent and charming man at the reception who turns out to be a female by sex. The second story is about a chain of events, began in the 1940s, with a 60 years old intellectually handicapped Satoru Nakata who can talk to cats.
Why I mentioned my hiking trip at the beginning is because at around chapter 13 to 20, before Kafka began to live and work at the library on Oshima’s help, he stayed at a house buried deep in the forest up a mountain. It was Oshima’s. This part of the story strike close to me, in essence that I could clearly picture not only the landscape but also the minute details and the information absorbed by Kafka’s senses. How cold and beastly the trees could be, the gust of wind, how heavenly the ray of sunlight that sneak past the canopies feel on his skin. On this condition, Kafka was not so bizzarre to me like he was in the beginning of the book. He contemplated the same stuffs like I did when I was deep in the mountain. Felt the same silly fears of some eyes watching. And Kafka even made me jealous, because he got to strip and shower in the rain, and buck naked lay on the floor of the mountain and enjoy the sun warmth on places it never touch. Imagining this alone made my skin tingles. He also felt the same confusion I had, suddenly becoming off balance and disoriented when he had to leave the forest behind, Oshima picked him up and drove them away back to civilization with his Mazda Maita green sports car. It’s funny that even if the moment you had within the forest was indescribably deep, that connection could snap so instantly. Like an interrupted magic spell.
Up to this point in the book, I grew to adore Oshima even more. He’s painfully intelligent yet has this aura of detachment and indifference. And Murakami’s bizzarreness always made me halt at some point of the story, he made me repeatedly weigh my own notion of good and bad. Though I don’t really have to, but somehow I just do. His strange characters is almost like a homework assigned to my moral stand point, it’s as if the story is feeding me, as much as its pages can, case studies on human beings who turn towards unexpected spectrums, obtaining qualities normally unseen socially. It’s addictive. Voyeuristic, maybe? Because it felt so intimate, looking at moments where a person strips all social formalities and I’m looking at things beyond the skin. In reality, I love and hate weird people at an equal balance. I love them for their curious way of viewing life and hate them because all I can taste is the tiny glimpse of their world. The same feeling when I look at works of art that fascinates me, I can only look at the surface, the information my visual senses can catch, but never the very essence that made them fascinating that was definitely born from a mind with curious happenings within.
I love how Kafka could respond to Oshima’s smart stories with simple but good questions. And I love Oshima’s many references and brilliant understanding to classical Greek myths, philosophy, and classic literatures. It’s like he’d never get bored and feel lonely when he’s alone with all the knowledge stored in his head. I keep turning the pages. But I need to put these thoughts down before they get crowded and overwhelmed by other things.
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