Kafka on the Shore

A few days ago, I made an unsuccessful attempt at reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago . This three volume memoir is highly recommended by Dr. Jordan Peterson, but unfortunately, I scarcely made it thru a quarter of the first volume. I recognize the importance of the work, but after so many tales of arrests and imprisonment during Stalin's reign in the Soviet Union, it becomes a bit tedious.

Putting away The Gulag Archipelago for another day, I began reading a novel I've been wanting to read for quite awhile - Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

Naturally, one would expect a novel with Kafka's name in the title to be more than a little unusual and that's certainly the case with Kafka on the Shore , although I would not use the word "Kafkaesque" in describing this book. If anything, I'd be more inclined to compare this work to Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita . Murakami's novel is more surreal and hallucinatory than anything Kafka may have written, with the possible exception of The Metamorphosis.

The story takes several bizarre twists and turns. In an interview posted on his English-language website, Murakami says that the secret to understanding the novel lies in reading it several times. That may well be the case.

The novel can, at times verge on the pornographic. The references to the music of Beethoven and Franz Schubert seems to me to be an attempt to draw one away from the novel's potent sexuality. I suppose the graphic descriptions of sex can be considered a very important element of the novel, but it all became too much after a bit.

Like in The Master and Margarita , cats play an integral part of the story. Murakami mentions the works of Natsume Sōseki who, it can be assumed, was an influence on Murakami's writing. It was my original intention to read Murakami's Norwegian Wood next, but I've decided to read Natsume Sōseki's I Am a Cat first. That book is more in keeping with the direction I seem to be led.