Kafka. Not Franz.

No spoilers; just opinion.

I finished reading Kafka on the Shore last night. It was a long read; a very long one.

Whenever I read Murakami (and this is only the second time), I get the impression that his books are larger than what's between the covers. It is as though Kafka were a metaphor for something else, which is itself a metaphor.

There are so many aspects of Kafka I want to talk about, but I don't think I can classify them into little boxes so that reading and understanding will be easy. I'll try, anyway.

***

Murakami makes a marked distinction between two kinds of knowledge: one that is acquired through reading and learning and reflection, such as that of Oshima or Kafka Tamura, and one acquired through silent acceptance and absorption, such as that of Nakata and Miss Saeki. There is a distinction there, too, in the way each deals with that knowledge (and knowledge is not the same as wisdom; wisdom is in translation of knowledge into action).

Oshima's or Kafka's knowledge is in retrospection, as is most knowledge we all acquire - we learn through reflection and introspection, and for that, the event needs to have passed us. But Nakata's is quite different - his is what I'd perhaps, very loosely, classify as knowledge through faith - there is no questioning there, or hurry, or impatient need to understand; just quiet acceptance. The Alchemist talks of this kind of learning too.

The distinction isn't merely in the way knowledge is acquired, I think; it's reflected in the kind of life one leads, and the suffering one takes upon oneself. With the first sort, there is always that awareness of individual choice, and in Kafka, it is both the cause of intense suffering and of redemption (to put it crudely). The second sort leads, and leads, and then it is over (cruder, I know).

***

There is a part in Kafka where Murakami references Hegel, and says that the self is not merely aware of the object as an external thing, but that through the relating that it (the self) does to the object,* it is able to understand its self better and more deeply.

That seems to me to be an underlying theme in the entire book. Every event, every memory, every little action; all of it serve to give each character a deeper understanding of his or her self. Each memory, event and action does not merely guide that, but is also the product of the self of the present. And the self-of-the-present is the product of the self-of-the-past that was moulded by event, memory and action. Time has no meaning, because the selves converge and diverge constantly, and yet, time guides the change.**

It is, in a way, about conscious change and the choices one makes, and also about how much choice one can have in a decision, and how much is foreordained, if at all.

For Murakami, there is only one journey, or at least, that is how it seems to me. The journey is not forward, because time has no meaning in his world; it's inside, to the deepest core of the self.

* "I" am the content of the relation, but "I" am also the one that does the relating.

** That feels faffy, but I can't fathom out how to articulate it better.