Book Review: Kafka on the Shore

Asian writers have been keeping me interested these past few months. For a while, I found South American and Spanish novels and books pretty interesting such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and the like. For long, I've been stuck to reading American and European classics, the books often read in high school literature classes and even in HUM 1. Filipino writers gives me the feeling of pride as usual and I find relative ease in reading them. But these past few moths, Asian writers interest me a lot. Junichiro Tanizaki's Quicksand was pretty interesting, Chinese women writers gave me an opportunity to peek at a paradigm of communism from the feminine (not necessarily feminist) view. But the one Asian writers I've been reading a lot lately is Murakami, a Japanese writer.
I was introduced to this writer through his book Kafka on the Shore. It is a story of a boy(named crow) who calls himself Kafka (after Franz Kafka) who escaped from his house after the death of his father trying to find his destiny and identity. it is also a story of an old man who, in his childhood days (wartime) became a complete tabularasa after an incident which nobody can explain. The old man was a cat-finder, a man who does not have any other competency in life but to find cats. people pay him for it and it becomes an extra for his livelihood aside from the support that the govt provides him. They did not meet in the story, but they are related by a connection someone can't explain. The boy searched for his mother and ended up in a library having sex with her. It was an Oedipus Rex kind of story with a lot of complications and entanglements.
One thing pretty interesting about the book is its surrealism. it was apparent in how events after events happen with the reader guessing what the connections with these events are. it did not so much provide resolution, just an ending. An ending that seems rather open-ended and will only breed up a continuum.
I do not also know if the book can be categorized under Magic Realism, a genre in literature where there is a convergence between real reality (or actuality) and the imagined or fantastic reality thus the name Magic Realism. South American writers are very fond of this convergence and exaggerates or heighten the reality so as to make them imaginably believable at least to the readers imagination. Anyway, there seems to be hints of convergence of reality and fantasy in Kafka because things that does not happen in the real reality seems to have been incorporated by Murakami into the Tokyo and Japan reality that the people share. Take for instance the time when it started to rain fish in the middle of the streets and pavements and other things like that. Initially, a reader might not involve himself directly to the story as to believe it directly, but the poetic time where the exists seems to have permitted the mind to wander at these possibilities. And i think that this is where Murakami is great at. Expanding so much the horizon of belief as to make the whole reality that the book presents absorb the mind's capacity to imagine all over.
I also liked how Murakami developed his character so vividly. His characters speaks directly to the mind as if they are people from among us. For one, they are very ordinary. an old man, a truck driver, a boy, a librarian, an artist, a salon worker. But what makes the characters worth knowing and meeting is the fact that they endure extraordinary experiences which, when viewed individually, accounts for greater and deeper understanding of individual worth and capabilities. Plus, i loved howMurakami seemed to make these ordinary people love classical music and books and things that are really interesting.
When someone is not crazy and imaginative enough, one may not find the book interesting at all. It might even be a bore (it was too thick). It works on a very ordinary and linear plot but in the linear meta-plots exists subplots which ,when interwoven and entangled altogether, creates a grand narrative of life and the complexities of it. The wittiness and the profundity of the language makes it altogether a fun and interesting read. It's depth in horizon and scale creates a huge recall to readers who are pretty interested in the weird and strange world of imagination and reality.