Summary
Colonel Sanders brings Hoshino into the woods. Hoshino asks if he is really Colonel Sanders, and Colonel Sanders says he is just taking the form because he doesn’t have a true shape: he is a “metaphysical, conceptual object” that exists beyond good or evil. Arriving at another shrine deep in the woods, they find the entrance stone as Nakata described it. Hoshino lifts the heavy stone, and the Colonel instructs him to wrap it up so no one sees; however, he claims it is not stealing but borrowing to remove the stone from the shrine. After taxing back to the hotel, Hoshino puts the stone on Nakata’s bed. Nakata wakes at five in the morning to find it next to his pillow.
Kafka brings coffee to Miss Saeki’s study. Images of her naked body come to mind as Kafka studies her behavior. He can’t tell if she remembers the night before. Kafka confesses his theory to Miss Saeki: his father was in love with her but couldn’t get her back, and so he wanted his son to murder him; he wanted Kafka to sleep with Miss Saeki and his older sister. That was his curse or prophecy, which is programmed inside Kafka. Miss Saeki comments that his theory is “throwing a stone at a target that’s very far away.” She says she’s over fifty and he is only fifteen. Miss Saeki says she is waiting for death. After having dinner with Oshima, Kafka is in his room when Miss Saeki visits. They discuss the painting of her boyfriend and take a walk to the beach. As though Kafka is her dead boyfriend, she asks him why he died. She comments that they’re all living in dreams. They kiss and hold each other, then return to the bedroom to make love. Miss Saeki cries, leaving wetness on the pillow. Kafka listens to her drive away. Kafka thinks everyone is living in dreams.
Nakata isn’t surprised to wake up with the entrance stone in the room. He does his exercises while waiting for Hoshino to wake up. They eat breakfast and drink tea. Nakata admits he isn’t sure what to do with the stone. Thunder rumbles in the distance as Nakata feels the stone. Nakata discusses how he feels empty, like a container with nothing inside. Nakata says he has to get the other half of his shadow back and be his normal self. He says his shadow isn’t normal because he left “here” and came back when he was in the coma. As lightning rips through the sky, Nakata says he has been scared ever since Johnnie Walker entered and used his empty body to have himself killed. Nakata asks Hoshino to flip the stone over; he doesn’t know what will happen once it does. The stone is now incredibly heavy, but Hoshino uses all his strength and turns it over. Nakata tells him the entrance has opened up.
In the morning Kafka goes to the gym to work out. When he brings Miss Saeki her coffee in the afternoon, he asks if there are any copies of her book about lightning. He mentions his father, and Miss Saeki says she didn’t interview anybody named Tamura. Kafka questions how she can be so sure when it would have been twenty years earlier. She says the air pressure is changing, and bit by bit things seem to be “building into a stream.” She says the sex they had seemed to be part of that energy. She says she thinks she is making up for lost time. They have sex again that night, exploring every part of each other’s bodies with their lips. They hold each other until dawn.
The bank of thunderclouds continues to pass over Takamatsu. Hoshino mentions to Nakata that his boss must be furious, and that he should get back to work soon. Nakata falls into a deep sleep again. Hoshino goes out and discusses classical music at a café. Nakata is still asleep when Hoshino returns to the hotel. Hoshino goes back to the café and discusses Haydn with the café owner. Hoshino has a revelation: he won’t go back to work, he will follow Nakata as long as he lives.
Oshima phones Kafka early in the morning to tell him they have to leave. Kafka gets ready and Oshima picks him up. On the drive to the forest, Oshima says the police called him last night because they believe Kafka might have had an accomplice in his father’s murder—an elderly man from Nakano ward. They traced the man to Takamatsu, and find the fact of both their trajectories being the same too much of a coincidence. Oshima also addresses that Kafka is sleeping with Miss Saeki, and tells Kafka that he thinks they should spend some time apart. Choosing his words delicately, Oshima says that he believes Miss Saeki is dying, and that Kafka is hastening her death—that he is the “train” she is waiting for. Oshima says there is nothing Kafka can do for her right now, and that she is bright and tough and needs to be on her own.
Hoshino returns to the hotel to find Nakata still asleep. In the morning Hoshino receives a phone call from Colonel Sanders. He says the police are looking for Hoshino and Nakata. Colonel Sanders directs Hoshino to leave with Nakata and the stone, hail a cab, and go to an address he provides. Hoshino is distressed to learn the police are after him. He manages to wake Nakata, who tells him about murdering Johnnie Walker. In the apartment Colonel Sanders sends them to, Hoshino finds a fridge full of food. After eating he asks about the Johnnie Walker murder. Nakata says he doesn’t want to turn himself in again because he has other things he has to do. Hoshino assumes this means he has to close the entrance they opened. They change clothes and walk to the sea beyond the pine forest. Hoshino asks if the entrance stone changed something. Nakata says it did, but he doesn’t know what.
Oshima drops off Kafka at the cabin. Kafka is resistant to the idea of being apart from Miss Saeki, who he loves. Oshima warns Kafka to be cautious if he wanders into the woods, explaining that in WWII, two soldiers went missing during a training exercise as the Japanese military prepared to fight in Siberia. Oshima says there is another world that parallels their own, and if one is careful, one can step into that world and return; however, past a certain point you become lost in a labyrinth. Left alone, Kafka makes a simple meal and thinks about Miss Saeki. He wishes he weren’t fifteen, as he is too young to understand everything Miss Saeki does.
Hoshino rents a car, buys Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, and returns to the apartment, where Nakata has been busy steaming daikon, among other dishes. Hoshino listens to the CD on repeat, transfixed; he never liked classical music before he heard this recording at the café earlier. Hoshino asks if Nakata minds the music, and Nakata says he doesn’t: to him, music is like the wind. On the news that evening is a story about the murder of Mr. Tamura, which happened ten days earlier. Hoshino asks Nakata if he knows the man’s son. Nakata says he doesn’t. They get in the rental car and drive around the city. Nakata says he won’t know what he is looking for until he sees it. They try again the next day, a Monday, with no luck. On the way back to the apartment, Hoshino neglects to turn off when he should have and winds up in a residential neighborhood. He stops in the parking lot of the Komura Memorial Library. Nakata realizes this is the place he was looking for.
On Tuesday, Kafka leaves the cabin and walks into the forest. He wants to see how deep it really is. He sees a black butterfly whose shape reminds him of the bloodstain on his shirt. He returns to the safety of the clearing. That night he wills Miss Saeki to visit him, but her ghost doesn’t appear. Instead he dreams about Sakura—a dream so vivid he feels that it is occurring in reality. With a hard erection, he climbs into her bed. Something inside him feels as though it is breaking out of its shell. He parts her legs while she sleeps and inserts his penis. She wakes up and asks him why he has entered her body and her dream without her permission. She tells him that they can’t have sex because she is his sister and he is her brother, even if they aren’t related by blood. She says they are “part of a family.” Even though she says he is raping her, Kafka continues to thrust himself inside Sakura until he ejaculates. He wakes up alone in the cabin having ejaculated. He rinses the semen off his shorts. Crow says he has fulfilled the prophecy, having killed his father and had sex with his mother, and now his sister. The dark shadow inside Kafka has revealed itself.
Analysis
Having located the entrance stone with Colonel Sanders’s help, Hoshino brings the stone and puts it next to Nakata’s pillow. While Nakata and Hoshino wonder what to do with the stone, Nakata speaks of the ineffable sense that he is an empty container. He is oblivious that his soul left his body during his coma, but he does understand that his shadow—a symbol for the soul in the novel—left and wandered in the other world, with only some of it returning to him when he awoke. Ominous thunder builds in the sky, enhancing the atmosphere of the world-altering supernatural activity they are taking part in. Eventually Nakata understands that he needs Hoshino to flip the stone over. With this change, Nakata understands that the entrance to the other world has opened.
Meanwhile, Kafka learns that Miss Saeki doesn’t seem to remember having sex with him the night before. He admits to his theory that she may be his mother, but it is ambiguous to what degree Kafka truly believes she is and to what degree he is using her as a surrogate in order to fulfill the Oedipal prophecy. Despite her initial resistance to his theories, Miss Saeki seems to accept Kafka as a surrogate for the boyfriend she lost, speaking to him on the beach as though he were in fact her dead boyfriend. Having embraced and accepted the taboo nature of their attraction, the two sleep together again that night, and again the next night, but now their lovemaking is without the somnambulant quality of the first night, which may or may not have happened in a dream Kafka took as reality.
Kafka’s contented intimacy with Miss Saeki is abruptly broken when Oshima informs him that the police are searching for him, having tracked both the suspected murderer (Nakata) and Kafka to Takamatsu. On the drive to the cabin, where Kafka will hide out, Oshima expresses concern over Miss Saeki’s mental and emotional health, saying that he believes her decision to sleep with Kafka is bringing about the death she has been waiting for. Kafka is reluctant to separate from her, but he accepts Oshima’s wish for them to spend some time apart.
When Nakata enters another coma-like sleep, Hoshino is at a loose end, wandering the small city and contemplating his responsibility to his employer. However, a fateful encounter with a classical music–loving café owner changes Hoshino’s perspective on his life. Touching on the theme of the transformative power of music, Murakami details Hoshino’s strange obsession with Beethoven’s Archduke Trio. The music stirs up something ineffable in Hoshino’s soul; it is enough to spark a moment of epiphany in Hoshino, and he decides to continue assisting Nakata on his quest.
However, the stakes of the quest are suddenly raised when Colonel Sanders phones Hoshino to tip him off about the police hunt for Nakata. After taking refuge in an apartment Colonel Sanders arranges for them, Nakata and Hoshino wait for Nakata to receive the next instruction from the parallel world. In an instance of situational irony, it is only when they stop looking that they stumble upon the Komura Library. Nakata realizes this is where they were fated to arrive.
Once Kafka is alone again at Oshima’s cabin, he disregards Oshima’s warning not to venture too deep into the forest and begins testing his nerves to see how far he can follow the path before needing to return. Having by now indirectly fulfilled two components of the Oedipal prophecy, Kafka has a dream in which he rapes Sakura, who identifies herself in the dream as his sister. In the space of the subconscious, which is associated with the parallel world, the cursed “dark shadow” within Kafka’s DNA reveals itself. Although the story began with him trying to outrun his fate, Kafka finds himself compelled to meet his fate, however obliquely.
