“Kafka On The Shore” by Haruki Murakami
Oh yes, Murakami. A genius writer and one of my all-time favorites. This novel was an adventure of awesome. There are two stories happening that are intertwined with each other and they are told through alternating chapters. All 430 pages were read in under 3 days. I just couldn’t put it down. I am absolutely in love with the way Murakami writes, his style is so poetic, full of beautiful imagery and easily visioned scenes, yet his plots are insane and twisted into dark realms of a conceivable fictional reality. I highly recommend this book to anyone, in fact, I would recommend any of Murakami’s books to anyone.
I chose to read this book for my awesome book club! I am so grateful to be in a book club. <3 We meet once a month, switching who hosts the gathering (the host picks the book), and we eat and drink pot-luck style. The month of March was at my apartment, so I picked this book and made sweet potato fries and kale chips. The food was delicious, but the book was better. (: I can’t wait till next month!
Now, some quotes to entice you:
“Sometimes the wall I’ve erected around me comes crumbling down. It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes, before I even realize what’s going on, there I am – naked and defenseless and totally confused. At times like that I always feel an omen calling out to me, like a dark, omnipresent pool of water.”
“As she breathes, the rounded peaks move up and down like the swell of waves, somehow reminding me of rain falling softly on a broad stretch of sea. I’m the lonely voyager standing on deck, and she’s the sea. The sky is a blanket of gray, merging with the gray sea of on the horizon. It’s hard to tell the difference between sea and sky. Between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.”
“When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages – a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers.”
“In ancient times people weren’t just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.”
“I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here – me included – will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away.”
“In the afternoon dark clouds suddenly color the sky a mysterious shade and it starts raining hard, pounding the roof and windows of the cabin. I strip naked and run outside, washing my face with soap and scrubbing myself all over. It feels wonderful. In my joy I shut my eyes and shout out meaningless words as the large raindrops strike me on the cheeks, the eyelids, chest, side, penis, legs, and butt – the stinging pain like a religious initiation or something. Along with the pain there’s a feeling of closeness, like for once in my life the world’s treating me fairly. I feel elated, as if all of a sudden I’ve been set free. I face the sky hands held wide apart, open my mouth wide, and gulp down the falling rain.”
“Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.”
“The library is quiet enough most of the time, but on a day like this when it’s closed it’s like land that time forgot. Or more like a place that’s holding its breath, hoping time won’t stumble upon it.”
“Things change every day, Mr. Nakata. With each new dawn it’s not the same world as the day before. And you’re not the same person you were, either.”
“Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly’s wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.”
“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
“Reality and dreams are all mixed up, like seawater and river water flowing together.”
“‘Originally I don’t have a name or shape.’
‘So you’re kind of like a fart.’”
“We sit there looking at the scenery. The clouds shift and the moonlight dapples the sea. Wind blows through the pine forest, sounding like a crowd of people sweeping the ground at the same time. I scoop some sand and let it slowly spill out between m fingers. It falls to the beach and, like lost time, becomes part of what’s already there. I do this over and over.”
“The clouds floating above the building were like hard clumps of dirt from a vacuum cleaner no one ever cleaned. Or maybe more like all the contradictions of the Third Industrial Revolution condensed and set afloat in the sky.”
“But the fear I felt clings to me like a clump of unmelted snow in the corner of a garden.”
“When I drink some water my cock automatically absorbs it. I can hear the faint sound of it soaking up the water.”
“Some men talk with stones, and some sleep with other men. Go figure.”
“‘Can nothingness increase?’”
“A faint breeze is cutting though the woods, making the leaves of the trees around me tremble. That anonymous rustling forms ripples on the fold of my mind. I rest a hand against a tree trunk and close my eyes. Those ripples seem to be a sign, a signal of some sort, but it’s like a foreign language I can’t decipher. I give up, open my eyes, and gaze out again at this brand-new world before me. Standing there halfway down the slope, staring down at this place with two soldiers, I feel those ripples shifting inside me. These signs reconfigure themselves, the metaphors transform, and I’m drifting away, away from myself. I’m a butterfly, flitting along the edges of creation. Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap. Where past and future from a continuous, endless loop. And hovering about there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”
“The pillow smells like sunlight, a precious smell.”
“‘What does it feel like? To be yourself and pat of me at the same time?’
She looks straight at me and touches her hairpin. ‘It’s very natural. Once you’re used to it, it’s quite simple. Like flying.’”
<3
