Haruki Murakami Review Part Two: Kafka on the Shore

This piece is the opposite of After Dark, being a long and extremely surreal work. I enjoyed most of this novel, and yet if it has a weakness, as I believe it does, this lies in its excessive surrealism and length. At the start of the novel we follow another person who's run away from thier family, a boy called Kafka, and an elderly man on some sort of invalidity benefit for learning difficulties, but who can speak to cats and therefore retrieve them for their owners. Following Kafka through his relationship with a fellow traveller who may be his sister, and an older lady who runs a library he works at, starts the piece perfectly. One of the ideas expressed here and elsewhere is that sometimes a persons life just halts, and that no more forward progression is possible, and yet they continue living for many years, is interesting and a superior alternative to more simplistic fetishisations of suicide. However, for me, the surrealism becomes far too much and really jars a work I'd invested in. The realitionship between the old man and a truck driver who journeys with him is beautiful, and yet when we get to the section where the truck driver speaks to people from other realities, or helps the old man retrieve a magic rock to assist in supernatural powers, this readers patience was tried. Kafka's realtionship with a library assitant of confusing gender is the extent of surrealism that fits perfectly in a Murakami work. Equally, the relationship between Kafka and the old lady, who used to sing but cannot without her lover lost many years ago, starts off beautifully but is jarred by excessive fantasy. One idea that could be in this work, though its always impossible to be sure with Murakami, is the disruption of war. Obviously the bombing and Japan and the Second World War provide a backdrop to alot of modern Japanese literature, and in this text there is the feeling of the work showing the extent of mixed up feelings, alienation from family, inverted morals etc., existing in a state which has experienced war. Therefore, this book is interesting and the characters excellently drawn, as usual. However, these people are so well drawn that it is a travesty that by the end the length of the book, and the excessive nature of its surrealism mean that potentially heart rending scenes lack that effect. If taken out of the real world, it is then hard to give two hoots about anything that happens in it because its importance and reality has been mocked. In the end, an interesting, but sometimes frustrating read.