Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami translated by Philip Gabriel
Harvill £12.99, 505 pages

Haruki Murakami’s new novel is a peculiar rites-of-passage story that jumbles together classical Greek tragedy, ancient Japanese mythology, themes from Murakami’s previous fiction and, as the title advertises, a form of modern phantasmagoria that nods towards Franz Kafka.

It is about a 15-year-old boy nicknamed “Kafka” Tamura (we never discover his real first name) who runs away from his cold, distant sculptor-father. A typical Murakami protagonist, Kafka is an uncommunicative adolescent loner: “I’ve built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself.”

He is also haunted by lost women, another favourite theme in Murakami’s books. When he was four, his mother and older sister abruptly left home without a farewell. As a character in the novel points out, he has “a lot of issues to deal with” - mostly of the Oedipal variety.

He travels from Tokyo to Shikoku, a southern island famous for tasty noodles and as a place of pilgrimage, where he is befriended by an effeminate young man who suffers from haemophilia and works in a private library. Many opaque discussions about meaning and being ensue (”Wind doesn’t have form. It’s just a movement of air. You should listen carefully, and then you’ll understand the metaphor”) with the librarian acting as a sort of Greek chorus, explaining the action to Kafka and leading him on towards self-discovery.

The novel’s other strand concerns Nakata, an elderly man who suffered a mysterious ailment as a schoolboy that erased his memory and stripped him of self-knowledge but left him able to talk with cats. He scrapes a living in Tokyo using his feline expertise to track down lost pets, which brings him in contact with a cat-snatcher with sinister designs on the neighbourhood moggies. Like Kafka, Nakata is impelled to leave Tokyo (there has been a savage murder), helped on his way by a trucker with whom he forms an odd-couple friendship.

Kafka on the Shore is undoubtedly a very readable book. Although the resolution is weak, Murakami builds suspense skilfully and draws you inexorably into a convoluted, fantastical storyline. Some of the set pieces, such as Nakata’s meeting with the cat-snatcher, possess a powerful sense of the uncanny, much like several recent Japanese horror films (The Ring, Audition). Murakami’s Japan is a modern, materialist society, full of brand names and references to western culture; yet it is also home to primeval supernatural forces, some terrifying, others benign.

Enjoyable though it is, the novel does not however enhance Murakami’s reputation as Japan’s most famous contemporary novelist, and one of the few to command a sizeable western readership. It may seem idiotic to complain about lack of plausibility in a meandering narrative featuring talking cats and ghostly spirits, especially one featuring a running commentary about metaphor and allegory - but that is Kafka on the Shore’s main flaw, and one that makes it a more insubstantial experience than its weighty appearance suggests.

Its characters, in spite of being prone to endless bouts of interiority and self-revelation (”There are a lot of odd things going on - but I feel like I’m slowly getting closer to the truth,” Kafka remarks at one point), remain thin, blurred presences. Murakami lists their clothing in obsessive detail: “He’s wearing a pair of Armani-type sunglasses, and a striped linen shirt over a white V-neck T-shirt, white jeans and navy-blue, low-cut Converse All Stars.” But there is no surface depth, making it hard to work up much interest in them other than as mechanical actors of an admittedly entertaining plot.

Although they spend their time endlessly searching for existential significance (”What is it inside me that makes up me?” Kafka wonders), these alienated characters are almost devoid of personality. Literally so in Nakata’s case: his selfhood was effaced by his strange childhood illness, making it possible for him to live only in the present moment. Oddly enough, his unlikely friendship with the trucker strikes the novel’s warmest note: there is pathos and humour in their portrait.

Murakami’s best writing amply compensates for his characters’ lack of life, such as his marvellous description of someone’s face going blank and then reawakening, “[a] bit like a parade that disappears down a street, then marches back on the same street towards you again”. Too often, though, he lets dialogue do the talking: page upon page of people having ponderous, over-meaningful conversations.

During one such exchange, Kafka’s librarian friend discusses the appeal of imperfect art (he has in mind a Schubert sonata): “I have no great explanation for it, but one thing I can say: works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that very reason - or at least they appeal to certain types of people.” Kafka on the Shore also possesses an eccentric imaginative appeal - but the imperfections stay in your mind after finishing it.