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lagg3r 's review for:
Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
My mind feels as though it went into a trance as I read this book. Truly this felt like sleepwalking through a labyrinth, but the deeper I went the less sense I could make of what was happening, at times it felt as though the path was getting wider, and paths were converging, then suddenly shifting gears and a new set of hazy screens would obscure my vision once again.
I think I struggled with this book, and grasping and being able to accept the surrealist aspects is not something that I was able to accomplish on my first (I foresee many more in the future) reading. Ironically, I think I tried to make too much sense out of what was happening, decipher each motif and symbol as though any indication of false reality was simply a hallucination playing out in the characters' heads and souls. But I'm not sure that's the right way to perceive this book. Perhaps accepting the unusual happenings as material, tangible occurrences would only then allow me to track the entangled metaphors. And if not, atleast then I'd be able to step back and appreciate the beauty of the complexity and nonsensical.
There are still parts that do not sit well with me, similar to how I felt during Norwegian Wood. Women feel as though they simply serve to fulfill the narrative undertaken by the male protagonists.
There is a weird scene that left me angry and annoyed, in which Oshima catches two, supposedly 'hollow', feminist inspectors by revealing that he's trans, and that somehow refutes all their points? As though simply because he has faced discrimination, it means they can not face, discuss, and especially try to do anything about their own experiences of discrimination? He describes them as 'these women are like people who have no imagination, they fill up their lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, mot even aware of what they're doing', 'narrow minds devoid of imagination, intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems'. But it's like the women really didn't show any of that?? He was immediately antagonistic from the very beginning to them, argued very pedantically and very weirdly, and used all these sophisticated book-ish arguments. This part felt incredibly internet bro-y, and very much so the whole, dumb, anti-SJW discourse in the mid 2010s, just disguised under the facade of being a transperson and somehow that shields him from any criticism. Whilst I was initially reluctant to take it as a flawed trait of a character who, other than that, was simply an erudite assistant propelling the story forward, the whole interaction left a sour taste on my tongue. This was one of the times that took me out of the book, and made me feel as though I was reading some diatribe forcefed into the story by Murakami. This simply felt like a window into the author, and a dirty, scratched, broken window at that, coloured in by a child, fruitlessly attempting to hide as stained glass.
The incest ended up serving its point, so frankly I was not irked by that too much in the book, it is a retelling of Oedipus, so the shocking and disgusting nature of incest and pedophilia did have to play its part. However, the continuous weird sexualisation of each woman. Do we really have to describe their breasts every single time they're observed? Atleast here it's a 15-year old boy, maybe I can chalk it up to his hormones pumping maximally, but these descriptions again felt as though they were shoehorned in as how Murakami genuinely perceives women, and the most prominent, important traits he feels they hold.
Overall however, these detractions were far and few between, and slowly lost to everything else as the book spiralled, circling the drain, faster and faster, until dropping down into the endless pit of dreams, where responsibility begins.
I think I struggled with this book, and grasping and being able to accept the surrealist aspects is not something that I was able to accomplish on my first (I foresee many more in the future) reading. Ironically, I think I tried to make too much sense out of what was happening, decipher each motif and symbol as though any indication of false reality was simply a hallucination playing out in the characters' heads and souls. But I'm not sure that's the right way to perceive this book. Perhaps accepting the unusual happenings as material, tangible occurrences would only then allow me to track the entangled metaphors. And if not, atleast then I'd be able to step back and appreciate the beauty of the complexity and nonsensical.
There are still parts that do not sit well with me, similar to how I felt during Norwegian Wood. Women feel as though they simply serve to fulfill the narrative undertaken by the male protagonists.
There is a weird scene that left me angry and annoyed, in which Oshima catches two, supposedly 'hollow', feminist inspectors by revealing that he's trans, and that somehow refutes all their points? As though simply because he has faced discrimination, it means they can not face, discuss, and especially try to do anything about their own experiences of discrimination? He describes them as 'these women are like people who have no imagination, they fill up their lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, mot even aware of what they're doing', 'narrow minds devoid of imagination, intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems'. But it's like the women really didn't show any of that?? He was immediately antagonistic from the very beginning to them, argued very pedantically and very weirdly, and used all these sophisticated book-ish arguments. This part felt incredibly internet bro-y, and very much so the whole, dumb, anti-SJW discourse in the mid 2010s, just disguised under the facade of being a transperson and somehow that shields him from any criticism. Whilst I was initially reluctant to take it as a flawed trait of a character who, other than that, was simply an erudite assistant propelling the story forward, the whole interaction left a sour taste on my tongue. This was one of the times that took me out of the book, and made me feel as though I was reading some diatribe forcefed into the story by Murakami. This simply felt like a window into the author, and a dirty, scratched, broken window at that, coloured in by a child, fruitlessly attempting to hide as stained glass.
The incest ended up serving its point, so frankly I was not irked by that too much in the book, it is a retelling of Oedipus, so the shocking and disgusting nature of incest and pedophilia did have to play its part. However, the continuous weird sexualisation of each woman. Do we really have to describe their breasts every single time they're observed? Atleast here it's a 15-year old boy, maybe I can chalk it up to his hormones pumping maximally, but these descriptions again felt as though they were shoehorned in as how Murakami genuinely perceives women, and the most prominent, important traits he feels they hold.
Overall however, these detractions were far and few between, and slowly lost to everything else as the book spiralled, circling the drain, faster and faster, until dropping down into the endless pit of dreams, where responsibility begins.