Summary
Kafka on the Shore opens with a chapter narrated from the first-person perspective of Kafka Tamura, the novel’s protagonist. Kafka sits in his father’s study and prepares to run away from his Tokyo home. Kafka has a conversation with a boy named Crow, a figment of Kafka’s imagination. They discuss how much money Kafka will need when on his own. Crow encourages Kafka to get tough for a sandstorm coming his way. Crow says he can’t outrun the storm because it is inside him. Kafka imagines the funnel of white sand pressing in on his skin, swallowing him up. Kafka says that on his fifteenth birthday he will run away to a far-off town and live in the corner of a library.
From his father’s study, Kafka takes cash, a gold lighter, a knife, flashlight, cell phone, and sunglasses—to disguise his age. He also takes a photo of him at the beach with his sister, who is six years older. Kafka has no photos of his mother because his father threw them all away. For clothes he packs just the necessities and decides to go to a warm place. Kafka says that he has been working out to bulk up and look older, to avoid unwanted scrutiny as a runaway. He has no friends at his private school and barely sees his father, despite living under the same roof. He imagines there is “a dark, omnipresent pool of water” hidden away in his body that could drown him at any moment. He looks at his face and considers how the DNA of his parents inside him contains an ominous “mechanism.” Kafka gets on a bus headed to Takamatsu, a city in western Japan on the island of Shikoku. A hard rain falls as he dozes on the bus. At midnight it is his fifteenth birthday. He feels the omen of his DNA is still with him, like a shadow.
The narration style shifts to show a declassified Top Secret U.S. Army document released to the public in 1986. “Report on the Rice Bowl Hill Incident, 1944” details an interview conducted by an army lieutenant; the interviewee is a schoolteacher named Setsuko Okamochi, described as “an attractive, petite woman.” Setsuko appears still shocked by the incident, which involved her taking a group of students to collect mushrooms on a hill. A bright flash of silver moved slowly in the sky, and she thought it was a B-29 plane, but there were no U.S. airplanes in the sky in that area on that day. The students began collapsing, until all sixteen were on the ground. Setsuko says they were unconscious, but their eyes moved from side to side.
The third chapter returns to Kafka on his bus ride. At a rest stop, Kafka drinks tea and talks to a girl who is also taking the bus to Takamatsu to visit a friend. They sit together for the rest of the journey. She falls asleep, and he notices her bra strap, then thinks about her soft breasts. He gets an erection. He stares at her chest and wonders if she could be his long-lost sister, even though she doesn’t look very much like the girl in the photo. She told him she has a brother about his age, however, and he figures that, at least in theory, it could be him.
The story returns to the Rice Bowl Hill report and an interview with Doctor Nakazawa, who went to give treatment to the collapsed children. He assumed they had eaten poison mushrooms, or inhaled poison gas, or suffered sunstroke, but when he arrived they were regaining consciousness and there was no indication of what had harmed them. The students had no memory of what had happened. One boy, Satoru Nakata, continued to lie on the ground with his eyes moving back and forth. The doctor checked up on the students in the following days and all were fine. He never learned what happened to Nakata, who was taken to a military hospital and never returned to the town. The police told the doctor not to speak of the incident. The war wasn’t going well for Japan, and discussion of such an incident would risk raising antiwar sentiment among the population.
Kafka’s bus arrives in Takamatsu. He learns the girl’s name is Sakura—not his sister’s name, but he supposes she might have changed hers too. He gives her his name, Kafka Tamura, which is the new name he has chosen as a runaway. She gives him her cellphone number and tells him not to be a stranger. They discuss how “even chance meetings … are the result of karma,” that their previous lives fate what happens in their current lives, and even small occurrences are not coincidences. Kafka checks into a business hotel, eats udon noodles, and takes a train to the Komura Memorial Library, where he spends the day reading. He takes a tour of the library, given by Miss Saeki, an elegant and beautiful middle-aged woman who Kafka thinks could be his mother. He returns to the hotel and reflects on how free he is now, alone in an unfamiliar place. He remembers his father’s cell phone, which he uses to dial his home phone. Kafka hangs up before anyone can pick up, having confirmed that his father didn’t cancel the phone plan. He wonders if his father even noticed the phone is missing.
The narration shifts to the third-person perspective of Nakata, the child from the Rice Bowl Hill report. Now an elderly man, he talks casually to a cat named Otsuka in a vacant lot in Tokyo. Referring to himself in the third person and mispronouncing words, Nakata explains to the cat that he hasn’t been able to read or write since an accident in his childhood; in the human world, this means he is dumb. He has a handicap pass that allows him to ride the bus for free and he is given a disability allowance by the government. Nakata shares the fact that he loves to eat eel. Nakata says he uses his ability by helping people locate missing cats, and he is looking for a tortoiseshell cat named Goma. Otsuka, listening politely, tells him he hasn’t seen Goma. Otsuka also says Nakata’s problem isn’t that he is dumb, but that his shadow is faint. Compared to other humans, Nakata’s shadow is half as dark on the pavement, as if his shadow has been half-separated from him.
In chapter seven, Kafka discusses with Crow how he is supposed to be the “toughest fifteen-year-old in the world.” Kafka lies to the hotel receptionist and says he is a student writing a graduation thesis and so would like to continue staying at the hotel for a discounted rate. Kafka goes to the gym and then the library, where he receives a call from the hotel receptionist, who says the manager has approved the discounted rate. Oshima asks about his name, and the two discuss the works of Franz Kafka. Oshima expresses mild concern about Kafka’s decision not to return home, and Kafka admits he is not sure where he will go next. Over the next week, Kafka develops a routine of working out in the morning, reading at the library, and listening to music and writing in his diary at night. Sometimes he masturbates while thinking of the girl at the front desk. He says that, on the eighth day, his simple routine is “blown to bits.”
Returning to another declassified military report, Lt. Robert O’Connor interviews Professor Tsukayama, who inspected the Rice Bowl Hill children. The psychologist developed the hypothesis that the children collapsed because of some sort of “mass hypnosis,” which didn’t affect the teacher. Nakata had been in a coma, but he didn’t appear to dream the way most coma patients do. The professor says “it seemed like the real Nakata had gone off somewhere, leaving behind for a time the fleshly container.” The professor relates his opinion to Japanese folktales, which often involve spirit projection. The concept involves a soul leaving the body to “take care of some vital task” before reuniting with the body. The professor says they tried to wake him from his coma by bringing in the scents of his favorite foods and his cat, which Nakata was fond of. Nakata eventually woke on his own two weeks later with no memory, having become “the proverbial blank slate.”
Kafka wakes up among plants near a Shinto shrine. He has no memory of how he got there, or of the past four hours. Someone else’s blood covers his shirt; the stain is still sticky and is shaped like a huge butterfly. In a restroom he washes the shirt in a sink, stashing the clothes in his backpack. Crow intervenes to convince Kafka to get moving to an inevitable next place. Kafka calls Sakura. He takes a cab to meet her outside a convenience store. They walk two blocks to the friend’s apartment where she is staying while the friend is in India. Sakura guesses he ran away from home. She says she did the same when she was sixteen, eventually becoming a hairdresser. She asks him to tell his whole story. Kafka does, but he leaves out the part about the omen.
Analysis
The opening chapters of Kafka on the Shore introduce the dominant theme of fate and also the dilemma at the heart of Kafka Tamura’s story. In order to escape his fate—a “curse” he believes is his programmed into his DNA—Kafka leaves home. However, Crow, Kafka’s alter ego, doesn’t think fate is something Kafka can simply run away from. Using a metaphor to compare fate to a sandstorm that is swirling inside of Kafka, Crow hints that Kafka’s fate will swallow him up despite his attempt to evade it.
Departing from Kafka’s first-person narration to tell the story through fictionalized declassified military reports, Murakami introduces the split-narrative motif to establish the novel’s secondary plotline. In the chapter, Murakami subtly introduces the reader to Nakata, the secondary protagonist to Kafka, who fell into a coma as a child during the Rice Bowl Hill Incident described in the document. It is a mystery how all the children fell unconscious at the same time, but the Japanese military limited the investigation or public knowledge of the event for fear it would negatively impact public morale during the Second World War—a time of great paranoia and fragility for the Japanese government.
The Rice Bowl Hill Incident and the coma Nakata enters are significant because they introduce the major themes of souls separating from bodies and the existence of a parallel world. While in the coma, Nakata’s soul seems to leave his body and travel in another realm—a literary trope from the Tale of Genji. While his soul takes on whatever task in the other world, the body Nakata leaves behind in our world is a shell of his former self.
Cognitively impaired, he can no longer read or write, and he lacks common human desires and emotions, never feeling lust or loneliness. He seems to exist outside of time as well, not interested in the time of day but rather operating based on his understanding of the angle of the sun in the sky. However, he has the ability to talk with cats, who function in the story as symbols of the porousness between alternate realities. Because Nakata is divided between worlds, he is able to access a common language with creatures who also live on the borderline between realms.
Meanwhile Kafka, having left home, forms a connection with Sakura, a young woman he believes could be his long-lost older sister. The introduction of Sakura also sees the introduction of the theme of taboo sexuality, as Kafka’s belief she could be his sister exists alongside him feeling attracted to her. In Takamatsu, an island city far from Tokyo, Kafka finds the Komura Memorial Library as the perfect sanctuary for a well-read runaway. There he develops connections with Oshima and Miss Saeki. Staying at his hotel, working out, and reading make up his manageable, solitary routine. However, the curse he has tried to outrun catches up with him in an unexpected way when he wakes up covered in blood.
