(Review) Kafka on The Shore by Haruki Murakami

Hey! Long time no see. I haven’t been reading (for pleasure) very much due to very little free time between my rigorous school and work schedules, however bringing a book to work for the past month has helped me with this. I didn’t expect going to make a post about this book, mainly due to my ever-deepening ambivalence in regards to it, but I have decided that my thoughts are worth sharing regardless. 

☆ ☆ ☆ +0.5 

I have chosen to rate this book 3.5 / 5 stars not because I dislike Murakami — in fact, I love him. I have read Hard Boiled Wonderland And The End of The World, which I reviewed on my Instagram (@ellasbooknook) in February, 2023. I was a senior in high school when I read it, and it turned out to be one of my favorites of all time. I still love Murakami for bringing me that when I was younger, and he still never ceases to amaze me with his intricate prose. 

Kafka on The Shore deals heavily with themes of inheritance, memory, trauma, discovery of the self, and complex relationships between humans. Murakami withheld necessary information until the end, as he does. There were so many mysteries, and there had to be to get through an almost-500-page book. It follows two storylines, one fifteen-year-old boy, Kafka, running away from an (impliedly) abusive father, and an old man, Nakata, who was a part of an incident as a child that left him unable to read, though able to speak with cats, and able to either predict or cause odd meteorological events. 

Now, usually I admire Murakami for not shying away from things in his writing, for being visceral, talking about sex plainly (when between two CONSENTING ADULTS), et cetera.  Here, however, I did not need constant, unnecessary descriptions (or even mentions) of teenagers’ genitalia, as I unfortunately found to be inserted quite often. I understand that fifteen is an age where young people are quickly discovering themselves and their own sexuality, however, I also didn’t feel that, even though Murakami played on the story of Oedipus, the main character had to be a minor in the first place, or that he had to have nonconsensual relations with his sister. Again, I feel they are the incestuous and murderous aspects of Oedipus Rex that make the myth disturbing — and that it did not need the extra layer of our “Oedipus” being a child having relations with his much older mother figure. 

For all of these reasons, I just don’t know if even Murakami’s beautiful writing and other wonderful characters (shoutout to Nakata!!) were worth the discomfort I felt throughout the first (roughly) 350 pages.