Reading Murakami is knowing that one enters a certain world where one will always go beyond what they tell us. It’s something magical that fascinates those who walk in, like Manoli, one of my main booksellers who recommended this read to me, while those who stay outside are almost disgusted: indifference has no place here. For me, it’s always a good option for that few days’ vacation in April, when the selfishness of pleasure is pursued by checking into a strange and wonderful hotel in Elche.
Murakami, 53, with a long narrator career behind him, is the person who published Kafka on the Shore (Tusquest 2022) in 2002. It is a mature work in which the narration is presented very experienced and little experimentally, that is, he knows very well what he wants to tell and how he wants to tell. And it is this experience that has gripped us as readers through more than 700 pages, where the desired outcome combined with the particular pleasure of reading each page.
The narrative revolves around two hostile characters, like Kafka Tamura, a rich fifteen-year-old boy who leaves home with a huge literary load and seems to be going through a crisis of puberty even with a divided conscience (“And it’s not the same person who comes out of the storm who pierces him», p.11); and Satoru Nakata, an elderly man who lives with the help of the government and his family, is not described as very intelligent as he suffered an inexplicable tragedy in 1944 when some young refugees briefly disappeared as a child, and only he has acquired an incredible talent: Talk to the cats and now you have a pending task.
These two narrative lines run in parallel throughout the novel, change in chapters, and are marked by different narrative points: the first person in Kafka’s future and the third person in Nakata’s history. The reader gets to know the rest of the characters, the group formed by Kafka Tamura and Oshima and Ms. Saeki, and the love stories that will give clues to the title of the novel, in that incredible library where they will work; and their cat Nakata, and Hoshino, a charming, close, cheerful, popular young man in his twenties with a great sense of humor, is the perfect counterpoint to creating a good literary couple. They are Murakami’s characters, cultured or wise, whole, profound, the fruit of life experiences that have the same characteristics no matter how old they are.
However, in his reading it must be taken into account that the universe constructed in a real Japan always has a tragic dimension that elevates it to a plane set in another possible world. The entire novel takes on the dimension of a Greek tragedy, with transcendent themes such as hatred for the father, misunderstanding and lack of compassion for the mother’s inexplicable absence, imaginary incest, natural sex, the need to fulfill the mission of salvation and admiration. and above all friendship. And all this always opposes the two planes, the plane of deep inner life and the new simplicity of existing societies. He advocates building a novel with endless possibilities for reading, always with a certain air of artificiality and almost magic (falling asleep, rains of fish, rains of leeches, talking to cats, searching for the stone, etc.), where ideas and content determine the choice and actions of the characters.
And why should you read this novel? Because inside it is the most authentic Murakami, which half the world respects and the other half does not own; because she is always permanently nominated for the Nobel Prize and this, for now, has already managed to become a brand new Princess of Asturias Literature Prize this year. Which is not small.