Kafka on the beach

Kafka am Strand ( Japanese 海辺のカフカ , Umibe no Kafuka ) is a novel by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami , which was published on September 12, 2002 in two volumes by Shinchōsha. The Japanese paperback edition followed in 2005. Within the first month of its publication, 500,000 copies were sold in Japan. Translations into several languages followed, including a German in 2004 by Ursula Gräfe at DuMont Verlag. The style is characterized by a magical realism , as in addition to realistic representation, fantastic elements are also incorporated.

content

Murakami tells the story of his protagonists alternately in two parallel storylines: in the first-person form and in the present tense that of fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura and in the er-form and in the past tense that of the approximately sixty-five year old Satoru Nakata. Both never meet personally, but are fatefully linked. They set off independently from their place of residence Tokyo - Nogata and travel to Takamatsu on the island of Shikoku .

The adolescent with the self-chosen first name breaks away from home and everyday school life. Basically, however, he is fleeing an Oedipus prophecy made by his father that he would kill him and sleep with his mother and sister, who left the family eleven years ago. At the same time, he undertakes a search for self-discovery and personal development. He is accompanied by a figure called the crow, who only takes the form of a bird in important situations. Most of the time she speaks, and then the typeface usually changes to capital letters, as the inner voice of Kafka's fears, gives him advice or encourages him: "From now on you will be the strongest fifteen-year-old boy in the world [...] THE ONE WHO FROM THEM SANDSTORM IS COMING, IS NO LONGER THE ONE WHO PASSED THROUGH IT ”(Introduction). On the bus trip, Kafka made the acquaintance of Sakura, a young woman who could be his adoptive sister six years older than his age. You are immediately likeable to each other and promise to stay in contact at the end of the novel. Kafka's destination is the Komura Memorial Library in Takamatsu, where he wants to improve his reading skills. Here he meets the manager Saeki, his presumed mother, who was friends with the son of the house as a girl, and her assistant Oshima, who becomes his advisor and guide in life. He immediately recognized him as a book lover and employed him as a helper, which meant he was allowed to live in the villa, typically in Saeki's former love room. Oshima, a man in a woman's body, explains the world to Kafka: “In addition to the world in which we live, there is always another one that we enter up to a certain point, and from which we can nevertheless return safely [...] But when a certain limit is crossed, there is no turning back [...] The principle of the labyrinth reflects your own inner being, which in turn is a mirror of the labyrinthine properties of your outside world ”(Chapter 37).

When the police are looking for him after the death of his father, Oshima brings Kafka to the forest of Kochi and puts him on the trail of the actual destination of his journey: Limbo , an in-between world. Here he is visited by the souls of the fifteen year old and fifty year old Saeki. He had previously had trance-like sex with both of them at night or in his dreams in his room next to the library, as did Sakura, with whom he found shelter for a short time after a surreal incident. So the prophecy of the father came true, although the true identity of women in the novel is never clearly stated (Cp. 47: "Are you my mother? [...] you should know the answer," says Saeki-san [...] " It was you who I had to leave. Kafka, can you forgive me? "). The family relationship of the people is, however, indicated again and again by temporal coincidences. In addition, the name Kafka is indicative of the labyrinthine situation of the protagonists: the boy chooses him programmatically only on his escape, Saeki composed and sang a song entitled “Kafka on the beach” when he was nineteen, which reflects her life situation and foreshadows her fate. In addition, a picture with this title hangs in the room in which she and her boyfriend loved each other as a fifteen-year-old and which she visits at night to unite with his deputy, fifteen-year-old Kafka.

In the soul forest, Kafka has to decide whether he wants to stay and increasingly lose his memories or return to life. Saeki is on his way to the other world, she advises him to go on living and nourishes him with her blood for the way back through the forest. He travels back to Tokyo at the end of the novel and wants to finish high school.

Even more clearly than in the Kafka chapters, the magical world intervenes in reality as a fateful force in the second storyline. As a primary school child, Nakata lost his memory and his ability to write, read and understand complex processes as a result of a puzzling event during the Second World War , but he can talk to cats and foresee surreal processes such as the rain of fish and leeches. He lives on his small pension and additional income as a cat hunter. Magical powers guide him and drive him to his actions. As a medium, he indirectly kills Kafka's dominant egocentric father Ko'ichi, a famous sculptor, in Nogata and has to quickly disappear from the city. In murder, three surreal events combine in different places. At the time of death, Kafka wakes up from his unconsciousness covered in blood at night in Takamatsu, while Nakata in Nogata, not far from the scene of the crime , is forced to kill cats by a demonic power that appears in the form and outfit of the advertising figure Johnnie Walker and drives away cats stab.

On his journey, Nakata joins the truck driver Hoshino and supports him in his actions. Because he gradually receives puzzling assignments that he does not understand and could not carry out without his strong friend. V. a. he has to find the magical entrance stone and turn it around to give Kafka access to the realm of souls, and visit Saeki in the library to tell her about the proxy murder, thereby reminding her of her guilt. She admits that as a twenty-year-old, out of pain over the death of her lover, she loosened the entrance stone, entered the intermediate realm, lived only preserved in her memories and felt away from people and others. a. later to have turned away from her son (Kp.31, 42, 47). After this conversation she dies and her soul meets Kafka in the forest village of Limbo. Nakata has thus accomplished its mission. After his death, the demonic power that has nested in him wells out of his mouth as a white, misshapen mass and tries to conquer the entrance stone, but is prevented from doing so by Hoshino, who cuts it up and burns it. Then he turns the stone and closes the opening to the other world in order to set up various things as they should be.

reception

Most of the critics were taken with the novel. For example, the book was included in the New York Times' 2005 list of the top ten books . In 2006 Kafka won the World Fantasy Award on the beach .

In a review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Jörg Magenau praised that Murakami managed to reconcile “Western individualization wishes and Far Eastern holism, while promoting freedom and necessity at the same time.” Murakami is a “friendly narrator” and his works are actually “youth books for adults " . Burkhard Müller wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the book lost its tension towards the end due to the constant alternation between the two narrative levels, but that it should nevertheless appeal primarily to young readers. "Because no one can write about what it is like to be abandoned and how surprisingly you get out of this typical trap of the beginning like Murakami."

expenditure

Kafka on the beach . DuMont Literature and Art Verlag, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-442-73323-5 .

Individual evidence

[1] ttp://www.47news.jp/CN/200404/CN2004042401000339.html

[2] ttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/books/review/tenbest.html

[buecher.de-3] ttp://www.buecher.de/w1100485faz383217866X