Kafka on the Shore

The cover sums it up. Surreal and intriguing. Simple, but deceptively so.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami is bizarre. It's populated by talking cats, unexplained (-able?) incidents, unsolvable riddles, Greek myth, Japanese fairytales, a little bit of Freud. It is highly addictive - I read it in about a day and a half, cancelling my plans to do so.

As a reader, I grappled with how to make meaning in a shifting landscape. Each of the pieces fits with another piece, but that doesn't mean that they all fit together. Somehow, this book exists in multiple dimensions, which is both profoundly liberating and deeply unsatisfying. For days, you find yourself returning to different facets of the riddle(s) and prodding, only curiously though because you know there are no answers here.

As a writer, I took notes on how to write the impossible: a book that obliterates the reader's Suspension of Disbelief - only to build it back up again, stronger than before. Also, how to write a book that is flawed in so many ways but is a masterpiece (maybe not Murakami's greatest masterpiece, but a masterpiece by lesser standards) precisely because it is so distinctive.

For example, the dialogue is stilted and serves more to muse on philosophy than to develop the plot or characters. A number of the characters are undeveloped and unconvincing. Events and mysteries are left to flap in the wind. According to his own account, the writer doesn't even know what it all means (although I suspect that his professed ignorance is also in part a strategy to heighten the intrigue).

Perhaps the trick is that all of these elements force the reader to work harder, to really engage with the novel and its ideas. It reminds me of fairytales (the real ones, not the adulterated pretty versions that kids read today), which contain morals buried deep and in criss-crossing strata - when I uncovered them they were like ropes that tied themselves around my body and with which I would always struggle for a few days before giving up and letting them become part of me.

And perhaps its magic is also part of the riddle - you can prod at it for days, for weeks, for months, but you know that there are no answers here.