I will confess that I bought this book purely because of its title. If they say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover then what do they say about judging a book by its title? What was it about the title that attracted me? Why, Kafka, to be sure. One of my all-time favourite writers. But in truth what was I expecting? A book about Kafka? Well, in truth I don’t know! A Japanese author? I love iIshiguro, maybe that played a part. No matter in the end. For once you embark upon a journey with a book all the reasons that you chose it in the first place almost cease to be relevant. And so it was that I became totally, utterly, completely immersed and absorbed in this incredible story. It will find its place on my TBRA shelf. (To Be Read Again).
There is something dreamlike and surreal about the novel. The tale of Kafka Tamura, running away from home at the age of 15, escaping a prophecy that he feels will engulf him. The parallel story of the elderly Nakata who can talk to cats and has such an endearing simplicity about him. His sense of mission and dogged, unquestioning purpose render him one of the most dignified characters in contemporary literature. The stories are linked obliquely and subtly. It’s like two halves of one world, yin and yang, an eternal paradox of the conscious and the subconscious.
Whilst questioning the Kafka of the title I could see the allusion. The dreamlike narrative, the parable like sequences from characters like Oshima. The absurdity at times, the perplexing characters like Colonel Sanders. But it’s a joyous thing! Whilst I admit that I so often look for literature when I read. And I so rarely find it. What I perceive to be true literature that is. But here in this wonderful book I have found it. And there is that wonderfully satisfying feeling. A richness of narrative. An abundance of evocative prose and some characters like you’ve never met before. The story is etched into my memory and I keep thinking about it.
Something else for me that defines literature as opposed to merely fiction. Is the books quotability. The more quotes the more I think it is literature!
‘Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free.’
I love that quote. It reminds me of a similar sentiment from Elizabeth Lowry’s 2018 novel Dark Water,
‘Ma’am, I sense terror in the everyday. And I don’t believe we’ve solved the problem of how to live.We’ve made that terror safe, merely by going along with the old ways and the old forms. We should be free to question, we should be free to reinvent, we should be free to feel that terror, the terrible freedom of being uncertain - but we aren’t; we cling to our false certainty and call it freedom and we can’t see what we’ve really created out of freedom is a prison.’
And as an habitual will scribbler myself where writing is a reflex, it’s something I simply have to do, I found this quote particularly meaningful,
‘The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is meaningless.’
And on the subject of life itself this seems particularly pertinent in this beleaguered time we are living through,
’…..in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.’
When a book ‘speaks’ to you it ends up not mattering whether it is a ‘good’ book. For what is a good book? Who decides whether a book is good or not? I’m sure you’ve been in that position where you get hold of the book everybody seems to be raving about. You read it and you are completely underwhelmed. If you’re anything like me you believe it’s your own inadequacy and you have seriously missed the point of something. Your lack of belief causes you to feel you have no right to call yourself a reader. But then you lose yourself in a book where you do connect and it doesn’t matter if nobody else in the world reads the book. Or nobody else in the world likes the book. If your life is the richer for having read it then isn’t that what makes a good book?
I found this to be a book of substance. There was a cultural richness to it in terms of music and art. But it is one of those books that fills you with emotion. Emotion that you can’t actually put into words. There is a beauty in the narrative, even the most gruesome, violent parts and there’s some pretty nasty bits here and I speak from the point of view of a cat lover. It’s that rare book where the book Cupid has fired his arrow this book has a forever place in my heart.
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