Mind games Murakami’s dance of the real and the imaginary BY JOHN FREEMAN
	Kafka on the Shore By Haruki Murakami. Alfred A. Knopf, 446 pages, $25.95.
	Related Links Haruki Murakami's official site

Haruki Murakami’s tenth novel features a cat finder who talks to felines, a pimp named Colonel Sanders, and an assassin who dresses up like Johnnie Walker. If this sounds a bit like a wax museum created by someone who spent much of the 1960s eating hash brownies, then you’re obviously new to this writer’s fictional universe.

Over the past decade, Murakami has coaxed a growing number of readers through the wormhole of his prose into the fabulous neon-lit interiors of his mind. Since 1994, there have been two story collections, a love story, a reissue of his 1987 cult classic Norwegian Wood, a documentary work of non-fiction about the gas attacks on the Tokyo underground, and one tremendous novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the Japanese analogue to Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

Unlike the Bronx-born DeLillo, Murakami’s world view is that of an existentialist addicted to play. Or as he said in a recent interview, "There are no answers in my world, but there is kindness." His characters are often caught up in events larger than themselves — like earthquakes and terrorist attacks. Although some of them hallucinate their way into a kind of protective remove, like the narrator of "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo," at other times it is indeed kindness that redeems them from the abyss of their own melancholy, as in the cotton-candy sweet "Sputnik Sweetheart."

Kafka on the Shore is Murakami’s biggest novel since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and almost as much fun to read. Originally published in Japan in 2002, several years after the devastating Kobe earthquake, it feels like a return to his most whimsical métier.

The plot has the shape of a teetering double helix. Half of the action follows the life of Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old who has renamed himself before going on the run from his sculptor father, who murders cats and uses their souls to make flutes. Kafka has another reason for leaving: he is not too keen about a prophecy that says he will kill his dad and sleep with his mother and his sister. So like Oedipus before him, he leaves town, taking a bus out of Tokyo to the island of Shikoku, where in the Takamatsu library he encounters a beautiful woman who becomes both his fantasy and actual lover. Kafka is also mentored by an effete young librarian named Oshima, who ferries him to a cabin far off in a forest that has mysterious qualities that tend to blur the real and the imagined.

The second strand begins with the presentation of a "Top Secret" US government document, one that describes how wartime evacuees looking for food in the Shikoku Mountains after World War II saw what appeared to be a UFO. And then they lost consciousness. All of the victims turned out fine, except for a boy named Nakata, who languished in a coma for several weeks. He then woke up, having lost his memory and his ability to read but gained the ability to talk to cats.

Fast-forward a half century and Kafka’s father, posing as Johnnie Walker, persuades Nakata to kill him. This has repercussions for Kafka, who believes he will be blamed for his father’s murder. His retreat into the mountains becomes a retreat into a semi-real nether world someplace on that shore between what is real and what is imaginary. Nakata meanwhile finds his way back to Shikoku, where the novel’s two narratives become one.

A one-time jazz club owner with a love of music as palpable as Nick Hornby’s, Murakami is clearly a fan of improvisation. Kafka on the Shore can be read as one long middle-of-the-night trumpet solo that noodles as far out onto the branch of believability as sound can go. And then, by keeping us distracted, it makes the branch disappear. Although there is more to Kafka on the Shore than this sleight of hand, Murakami is smart to place his disappearing act front and center. After all, this is a story about the fuzzy boundary between what happens in our minds and what happens in the real world — and how easily one can pass between the two.

In this sense, Kafka on the Shore is a book about storytelling, about myths and about our desire to become part of them when we in fact already embody them. Talking to a spirit projection who might be his mother, Kafka backs himself into a corner while thinking about this. He says that metaphors can reduce the distance.

"We’re not metaphors."

"I know," I say. "But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me."

A faint smile comes to her as she looks up at me. "That’s the oddest pickup line I’ve ever heard."

"There’re a lot of odd things going on — but I feel like I’m slowly getting closer to the truth."

"Actually getting closer to a metaphorical truth? Or metaphorically getting closer to an actual truth? Or maybe they supplement each other?"

Only in fiction can this metaphysical game of "Who’s on First" be fun rather than irritating. Or perhaps this is true only in the works of Haruki Murakami. If so, I can understand why people keep coming back to them. Kafka on the Shore might also be a good place to start.