Kafka on the Shore, readers at sea

Reaching the end of Murakami’s novel has done little to explain its mysteries, but has brought some appreciation of his ability to blend the fantastic and the prosaic

I’ve now finished Kafka On The Shore - but I don’t feel as if I’ve got much closer to getting to grips with it than last week. The nearer I got to the end, the further I felt from grasping anything of any real weight. There were, as David Mitchell elegantly summarises, a lot of unanswered questions:

The wartime X-File is revisited only once, the UFO is never explained, and the spectral village between the worlds serves little discernible function, beyond being a place for Kafka to escape to and then a place to escape from. The mythic motifs also remain frustratingly shady. Is Mrs Saeki really Kafka’s mother? (The answer, given to Kafka, is “you know the answer”.) Is Sakura, a fellow passenger Kafka meets early in the novel and “rapes” in a dream later on, really his sister? Did Kafka actually kill his own father in another dream using Nakata as an unconscious proxy? Is the Boy Named Crow, Kafka’s occasional companion, Kafka’s familiar, his superego, or his what? Is a giant evil slug crawling across a Takamatsu apartment an incarnation of Kafka’s father trying to enter the netherworld?

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