Post 7: Rewrite History: Reflection of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
In one of the lectures near the end of March, our class was talking about culture invasion and rewrite. Professor Dissinger says “these things happen over time. They invade a culture then they erase the culture then rewrite the culture, and the generations down the line [will] get born into a rewritten cultural space [and] have no clue what happened prior to that.”
This has reminded me of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, which concerns the post-war anxious Japanese society and residents; meantime, the author also uses various ways to avoid Japan’s responsibility of starting the war to heal the residents. In World War II, two atomic bombs smashed the Japanese emperor’s ambition to conquer the world; in 1995, Japan suffered the Great Hanshin Earthquake and Tokyo subway poison gas incident; in 1997, the Japanese economy was on the brink of collapse due to failed bond transactions. Therefore, the Japanese people at that time felt decadent and disoriented, thus yearned for spiritual support. In such a panicked society, “healing” became Japan’s new national theme in 1999.
At the moment, Haruki Murakami combines the different creative techniques of Eastern and Western literature to heal the people as well as exculpating Japan from starting the war. Although he expresses his opposition and condemnation towards the war, he also believes that war is an “inevitable” act of “helpless”. He mainly borrows the techniques of Franz Kafka’s absurdity, obscures the nation’s memory of war through the use of dreams, and gives the protagonist Tamura Kafka a triple clone to show his rebirth process and imply war into human instinctive desires, thus indirectly heals Japanese society.
Absurd literature was first proposed by the French writer Camus, meaning “unreasonable and conventional” (Randle 2007: 2). It is characterized by abandoning the logic and coherence in the structure, language, and plot of traditional literature; expressing the theme with symbolism and metaphor. This technique: “consciously make the work appear uncertain to achieve a certain writing purpose and artistic effect” (ibid: 4). This post will analyze the absurdity of the plot and character settings in the book to explore the healing process.
In terms of plot, the author uses a two-line structure to connect absurd stories, thereby indirectly denying the existence of war. First, the author achieves healing effects through the use of “dreams”. Dreams have the authenticity of life, and at the same time the illusion of human unconsciousness; it allows the author to evade the war and escape responsibility. In the article, a female teacher’s menstrual blood outflew when she had intercourse with her husband on the battlefield in a dream. After being seen by the student Nakata, she felt ashamed and abused him, causing the students to coma. The female teacher felt “very regrettable” and “annoyed”, saying that “I used violence” was the “most impossibility”, felt “remorse” and felt that the memory “reappears in front of her eyes”. As a result, the writer sets the dream as the carrier of war, indirectly blurs its authenticity, and obscures the memory of the country launching the war in the minds of Japanese readers, thus “rejecting history, denying history, and obliterating memory” (Yoichi 2007: 146).
Then Nakata says “I have been always dreaming these days… my head is not so good anymore…” (Murakami 2016: 393). Here, the author made Nakata become mentally retarded in his dream and attributed the damage of the war to dreaming, which not only denying the war again, but also subtly allowing readers to embed Nakata’s experience into themselves so that the people can forget the memory of starting the war, and thus feel comfort and healing.
Secondly, the writer uses Yeats’s poem to express the “inevitability” of dreams: “Responsibility begins in dreams… Without imagination, responsibility cannot arise” (Murakami 2016: 142). “However, you can’t refuse to sleep, and us within sleep must dream. Being awake, we can stop the imagination, but within the dreams, we can’t” (ibid: 149) As an idealist poet, Yeats’s works themselves have the bourgeois and absurd scents. Here, Murakami believes that the responsibility for launching a war “begins in a dream”, and attributed the launching of the war to an “inevitable” act, which implies that the evil of the Japanese nation is illusory and inevitable, so the citizens need not feel guilty and self-blame. In short, the author uses the absurdity of the combination of reality and fiction to imply that historical wars are false and unavoidable so that the people feel relieved.
On the other hand, the creation of Kafka Tamura, the protagonist of the novel, is also absurd. His real-life is based on the absurd Oedipus-style mythological plot — -killing the father and raping the mother — -so the character of Kafka itself is absurd. In the ending, he actually grows up in a mythical experience, gaining spiritual and healing by fornicating his mother and sister, becoming the “most tenacious fifteen-year-old” and “part of the world”, thus making the Japanese people feeling hope and healing. Such a plot that breaks the bottom line of human relations and morality shows readers the source of human primitive desire from the absurdity.
Moreover, in the novel, Tamura Kafka is illogically divided into three roles: Tamura Kafka, Nakata, and a boy named Crow. Such a character separation conforms to Freud’s theory of personality structure: Kafka represents the “id”, that is, unconscious instincts and desires — -he deliberately realizes the curse and desires to have sex with his mother, sister, and other women, thereby treating his maternal injury; Nakata represents “ego”, that is the consciousness of the real individual’s limitation of his abilities — -he never asks the governor brother for any money and is aware of his intellectual limitation; the boy named Crow represents the “superego”, that is, the spiritual guidance and reflection of human beings on themselves — -he will talk to the “id” and evaluate his behavior at specific critical moments, such as “you do so well” “The most correct choice”, “Authentic guy” and so on. In the book, Kafka’s associations and reflections on war are interspersed without any media in his sexual intercourse with the sister-like characters on the sexual storyline of “id”. After raping Sakura, Kafka was not punished, that is, not guilty. As a result, sexual fantasies (the id), war, and innocence are deliberately connected without any media, giving readers a hint that war is a human unconscious instinct, and the exercise of this instinct will not be punished: that is, though launching the war Japanese citizens will not be punished, thus giving readers healing thoughts.
Haruki Murakami believes: “A story can express something at a level beyond interpretation, and can express something that cannot be explained in a general situation” (Rubin 2014: 265). Therefore, Kafka on the Shore’s seems illogical absurd elements can precisely help the writer express profound ideas. These absurd aesthetics made the Japanese people feel the healing wind, which is a successful practice of Haruki Murakami’s innovation of traditional literature.
Intellectual laborers, such as Murakami, ought to take the responsibility of presenting the objective history and disclosing the truth. Though in the book he does not explicitly express his ideas, we can see how he subtly incorporate unique plots and settings to potentially cease people’s memory and guilt on starting the war. However, how can future readers, especially Japanese audiences, reflect on their past mistakes if they do not even know what the mistakes are?
References
Murakami, Haruki. 2016. Kafka on the Shore. Shanghai Translation Publishing House.
Randle, Lu. 2007. “The Absurd Is Not Absurd-On the Truth Behind Absurdity”. Foreign Language and Literature.
Yoichi, Komori. 2007. Intensive Reading of “Kafka on the Shore”, New Star Publishing.
Rubin, Jay. 2014. Listen to the World of Haruki Murakami. Nanjing University Press.
