Where do our words go when we realize they are not enough to explain something? If we do not employ language for the indescribable, then they will travel from the tips of our tongues down our throats and into the belly, becoming a withheld sneeze. If we let them out, they only fumble and spill out like splattering hot oil. But where do the words go when we understand—from the outset—that they are not enough to explain something? Perhaps they go where the shadows of some characters in Murakami Haruki’s Kafka On The Shore have gone—to a place where the moment they are meant to describe has been trapped in amber, timeless and out of reach. Murakami’s Kafka On The Shore is another engaging, page-turner novel among the collection of his narratives that radiate mystery. Kafka On The Shore follows Kafka Tamura, a native of Nakano ward in Tokyo. He dares to flee home from his father, who he consistently claims has treated him poorly. Kafka’s mother disappeared when he was a young boy and he can scarcely grasp an image of her in his mind’s eye. The 15 year-old-boy guides himself westward, winding up in the town of Takamatsu in Shikoku, watchful of others noticing his age and surmising that he is a runaway.
     While Murakami writes in first-person for chapters about Kafka, he switches to third-person for Nakata, also from Nakano ward, Tokyo. In a handful of entrancing occupation-era “reports,” Murakami tells of a whole class of students falling unconscious during a hike at a time when bombing raids are common over Japan. One of those children was Nakata, who, unlike his peers that day, failed to awake soon after, and was left without memory, the ability to read, and the ability to understand abstract concepts when he did awake. However, in his older age, pronouncing the unfamiliar word “subsidy” as “sub-city” throughout, he does have the ability to speak with felines. Nakata is Murakami’s initial portico to the metaphysical—someone who can cross the border of language, possibly because the greater part of his brain was evacuated decades before.
     As the book reaches a steady march, Murakami alternates between following Kafka and Nakata, from “I” to “he” and back again. Naturally, you begin to favor one of the threads that you know will eventually touch. I couldn’t wait to read the trouble that Nakata got into, or what other hidden abilities he possessed beyond speaking with cats. But Kafka On The Shore is not entirely a treatment in metaphysics. Both connected to, and below that novelty, is an interrogation of what an inescapable and transformative past means to the present. Kafka, Nakata, and a third of four main characters, Miss Saeki, are interminably shaped by their past in a way that constantly interferes with the present. Kafka is scarred by his father and his mother’s departure; Nakata is mentally challenged because of an event of unconsciousness that left him far behind his peers; Miss Saeki was robbed of a future because of a senseless loss in her life.
     Murakami shines in manipulating each character. They each operate tightly within the pain of their past, having built ideologies out of the restrictions that come with their suffering. Hoping not to be robbed of anything more, the young Kafka seeks escape while also grappling with his growing sexual appetite. The elderly Nakata doesn’t know what he seeks, because he lacks the mental capacity, and moves clumsily forward on the basis of his sage intuition. Miss Saeki operates in a space of longing for the past, existing as an empty vessel from which her once-living self sprang, consistently showing a tight-lipped smile. With each character, Murakami seems to be interrogating what it means to be inseparably marred by a past, as we all are to some extent, but so much that it provides an insurmountable system to live within. There is certainly no right answer, for some pain is insurmountable, and Nakata for example, has fewer tools to cut that pain.
     The landscapes of Kafka On The Shore are not nearly as dramatic or harsh as A Wild Sheep Chase—the book that made me a Murakami fan—and that’s partly because crucial moments in this book take place in a library, in a hotel, and the softer lushness of Shikoku. Constant between these two works is Murakami’s skill at creating a mood about the surrounding atmosphere of a scene. The intensity carries the characters onward like a film—indeed the narrative doesn’t dilly-dally for a 450-plus-page book—but the atmosphere intertwines itself with the narrative because of the mystical themes throughout. When reading, there is a sense of value in surrendering oneself to the encircling world. Beyond describing the physical aspects of a scene, Murakami can expertly craft what it means to be somewhere from any perspective, a true portrait of 雰囲気, literally the mood in the surrounding atmosphere. It is this vibe, permeating the novel, that carries the reader to Shikoku, the Komura library, to struggle.
     As we reach the latter half of the novel, and especially the final dozen pages, instances where spoken language for Murakami’s characters breaks down and is made useless, become more frequent. Nakata continually reaches his ceiling for spoken language, either with humans or cats, and is also driven by intuition, so the shift is not as dramatic for him. But Kafka, by the end of the book, finds such metaphysical, inexplicable, and world shattering experience, that he can only nod in acknowledgement with those who have experienced the same. At last, Kafka understands that language is useless for him to explain what unearthly mysteries he has been lucky enough to see. He can only commiserate with a fellow who has been through the same.
     In that final instance, the breakdown of language for unique experience speaks directly to the inescapable nature of some character’s past. How can one explain what parental abandonment feels like or senseless loss to someone without those experiences? Murakami, a writer, seems to be saying that language fails to reach that threshold and that only shared experience, understood through intuition and the metaphysical, has any hope of providing the same agreed-upon reality. Thus, reality is fundamentally different for those carrying the burden of an insurmountable past, and can only be understood through shared lineage. A softly hopeless endeavor.

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