You know what I had started to think? I had started to feel that I was beginning to lose the passion with which I used to approach literature. I had been reading good books by really accomplished writers and I had begun to like almost everything that I read, which made me think that perhaps that faculty for criticism which I thought I had was beginning to desert me. Reading a lot of good books can become a little boring just like life can be a little too perfect and a dessert can be a bit too sweet. It also lessens the appreciation that one has for a really good work of literature. But thanks to Murakami's 'Kafka on the shore', that latent hate that I reserved for sub-par literature was immediately fanned and I feel so much more alive now.
I know exactly the kind of person who would like the book. A lot of such people must surely exist considering how popular this book has become. I imagine a prototypical fan of Murakami to be a hopeless spiritualist who goes about his/her life believing that there is something supernatural and mysterious that life eventually offers, something that is forever beyond the grasp of science, logic, rationale, or even words for that matter, but at the same time its essence is such that you would be able to comprehend it if only you looked into your own being with courage, determination and honesty. Such people are not necessarily religious but they differ from those who are merely in the thrust of their own irrationality. I feel that they would very much appreciate the open-ended theme of the book with its dream-like sequences, irrationality and elaborate symbolism. They would also like this book because it doesn't really make much sense and somehow a lot of people just love it when things don't make sense, for then they can attribute to those things, their own little interpretation (however inane) and feel special and 'connected with the universe'.
I love good surrealism and imagination. Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' is a book which stands testimony to that. So does Carroll's 'Alice in wonderland'. These works have their own logic and rationale to them. They have their own set of rules which are well defined and then they go about being mad within those rules. It gives a profound sense of tautness to these works and as a reader you never feel being cheated by the author. I believe that the most pleasurable part of a work of art is its struggle against its own boundaries and in the absence of any boundaries it ends up losing much of its charm. And this is what is wrong with Murakami's book. He has disguised what appears to me his own incompetence by implicitly declaring that he won't follow any rules, not even his own. Writing becomes a lot easier for him because neither logic nor completeness have to be respected and at the same time the 'mystique' and incomprehensibility of the book lend themselves to easy adoration by the urban pseudo-intellectual brigade. And to top it all off, the utter blandness of the dialogue is irritating. Whenever the characters are not talking in single sentences, they are describing in elaborately long paragraphs as to how they have no clue what's happening to them. They seem to believe that if only they express their own robotic presence in deep and mysterious sounding dialogue, the need for at least some coherence and explanation can be done away with. And unfortunately it may not be terribly far from the truth either. A lot of people, perhaps impressed by how less the book makes sense, attribute a certain genius to Murakami which I don't think he has. They perhaps forget that a good work of art, however incomprehensible in the beginning, must lend itself to logical understanding if enough effort is put into it and that effort coupled with the eventual understanding of the work is directly proportional to how much pleasure one extracts from it.
My god I despise this book. And yet it has certain passages which have their own poetic beauty. As I said, you may even find the whole book very much to your liking. 2 and a half stars, therefore!