. Spinning .

Then Murakami subtley disappoints:

As Miss Saeki went around interviewing people for her book, maybe she met my father.  It’s entirely possible.  There can’t be that many people around who’ve been struck by lightning and lived, can there?

I breathe very quietly, waiting for the dawn.  A cloud parts, and moonlight shines down on the trees in the garden.  There are just too many coincidences.  Everything seems to be speeding up, rushing toward one destination.  (p. 253)

There are a few passages such as the above, where Murkami appears to have the narrator do the thinking that ordinarily is left to the reader.  Murakami, I’m thinking, even while throwing in some danged wonderfully enticing thought-provokers such as the intrigueing  characters and events, likes to maintain control.  In several cases he has spent a couple pages on backstory.  This, halfway through the book when we’ve come up with what we felt were rather good ideas of our own.

It’s almost like telling the reader he’s wrong; no, this is what happened, not what you’re thinking.

Murakami is a master storyteller, laying out threads macramed into a pattern.  But the design is almost too elaborately deliberate. As our young Kafka says, "There are just too many coincidences."

As I said, up to these last few chapters life was rather tranquil for both Kafka and Nakata.  Then McCarthy stepped in with blood and guts and now, Marquez.  Raining fish and leaches.  Two of my favorite authors though, so for me, the novel has taken a hold of my heart.

There is the thread of relationships here, and the understanding and acceptance of people as they are regardless of what they appear to be. So that the characters themselves may be the metaphors. 

A connection between these two characters’ stories has been made, though not in a simple straightforward meeting.

The man who Nakata believes he has killed may in fact be Kafka’s father, though Kafka wonders if he himself didn’t manage it since it was the night he woke from unconsciousness, his shirt covered in blood.

I’m finding great new things to like about Murakami.  Who else would suddenly open the sky and rain down sardines with the occasional mackeral?  Marquez used yellow flowers.

One of the things I hate the most is being laughed at for being dumb, but I can’t help but laugh along with those of you who’ve read Murakami and have noted my comments so far about his unmetaphorical writing style.

Johnnie Walker killing cats and saving their heads in a freezer?

No, I haven’t come to any real conclusions about it yet, but I’m beginning to see the depth in Murakami’s novel that I pleasantly passed over until now.  There’s wonderful story here, but there’s more, much more.

Hoo-boy.  Murakami has just presented us with McCarthy’s Judge (Blood Meridian) in the form of a man who dresses like and calls himself Johnnie Walker and who claims he must kill cats.  A philosopher, a man who forces one to look at himself–in this case, Nakata–and pushes one to go beyond one’s worst imaginable capabilities just to prove the evil residing within us all.

"…But listen to me–there are times in life when those kinds of excuses don’t cut it anymore.  Situations when nobody cares whether you’re suited for the task at hand or not.  I need you to understand that.  For instance, it happens in war.  Do you know what war is?" 

"Yes, I do.  There was a big war going on when Nakata was born.  I heard about it."

"When a war starts people are forced to become soldiers.  They carry guns and go to the front lines and have to kill soldiers on the other side.  As many as they possibly can.  Nobody cares whether you like killing people or not.  It’s just something you have to do.  Otherwise you’re the one who gets killed."  Johnnie Walker pointed his index finger at Nakata’s chest.  "Bang!" he said.  "Human history in a nutshell."  (p. 142)

Murakami has eased us into this scenario–a lot stranger and bloodier than what I’ll give away here–that places us in a very uncomfortable position.  I squirm a bit as I read, and even McCarthy didn’t quite make me do that.  I think the fact that even as the action and pace steps up, we were lulled into two still comfortable worlds where we thought we knew some things were hiding beneath the surface, but didn’t expect to open the door into hell with the flip of a page. 

But it doesn’t make sense…

The dog’s eyes were as glazed and lifeless as glass beads congealed from swamp water. (p. 122)

Now I like Murakami for his simple writing style and great story, but I love metaphor and simile and when I come across a good one, I melt like chocolate on a sunny dashboard. I get the picture Murakami is drawing here, swamp water would be murky yet translucent.  But lifeless?  Swamps are notorious for being chockfull of life.  Why there are more living things in one drop of swampwater than there is likely to be in a square inch of fresh air.

I’m perhaps a bit overwrought lately and thus not as forgiving and generally all-around nice as I normally can (and hope I can remember to) be.

Ah, my world is riddled with mystery lately.  Here’s some from Murakami:

Okawa glanced at the photo and made a gloomy face.  Frown lines appeared between his eyebrows and he blinked in consternation several times.  "I’m grateful for the sardine [Okawa is a cat] don’t get me wrong.  But I can’t talk about that. I’ll be in hot water if I do."  (p. 121)

The dual story lines parallel each other as to mood it seems.  Just as Kafka is hiding away since he woke from unconsciousness with blood stains on his shirt, here Nakata in his search for the missing cat Goma is running into what looks like something deeper than just a runaway cat.

Murakami does a great job of storytelling.  Either story could likely stand on its own but in alternating chapters between them, with the different style of each, one enhances the other as we catch certain points of relativity.  The unconsciousness, the sense of aloneness each character feels, their backgrounds, their reaching out in communication to something other than another human being (Kafka’s mental Crow, Nakata’s speaking with cats) are similar and we are eagerly expecting perhaps a meeting of these two. 

If this text were hyperlinked, all these connections would perhaps be shown up for what they are.  Therefore, the question is raised of whether hypertext in fact does make life easier for the reader–showing rather than allowing the reader to make this connections himself.

There has really been no language style that Murakami uses that has had me race to the computer in admiration; his style is pretty straightforward writing without metaphor, simile or particular beauty of words.

I think where he excells perhaps is with story first, and then with drawing his characters:

I try putting into words my impressions of the novel, but I need Crow’s help–need him to show up from wherever he is, spread his wings wide, and search out the right words for me. (p. 106)

This is the boy Kafka talking with a young man who works at the library who has befriended him.  Murakami is now more clearly showing us that the boy called Crow is a part of Kafka, perhaps an alter ego that allows him to overcome his shyness in speaking with other people.  Crow is the one in the opening scene who Kafka was telling of his plans to run away.  Crow is the one who told him that he’d have to be the toughest teenager on the planet to carry them through.  With the implied isolation of Kafka’s childhood, it seems reasonable that he would form this friend, this helper to allow him to cope with the abandonment by his mother and sister, the disassociation of his father, and the reticence in forming relationships with others his age.

Each minor character is given a description of sorts that allows the reader to picture them and get a feel of how they are reacting to Kafka.

Perhaps this blunt not prosaic language is a way of helping the reader get into the story just by its very common reality.  And from there, Murakami brings us talking cats.

As I’ve said, every other chapter alternates between the two stories, that of Kafka and of Nakata.  Nakata’s story is told by a series of difference techniques and timelines that defy linear sequencing in that while they start out as an investigative report on the incident of the children collapsing (including Nakata) on the hill during the war, it then appears to come up to Nakata’s present, then back to the report, and the latest chapter (12) midway between.  This is also told in the form of the teacher’s letter to a psychologist who investigated the incident back in 1946. 

Murakami is also one to answer the questions he raises by a form of telling using this technique.  I’m not sure whether some of these answers are to the purpose of dispelling or relieving the tension of the mysteries presented, or whether it is indeed to bring us to the realization of the approaching tie-in with the two main characters.  In this chapter, the teacher’s explanation of events includes her assessment of Nakata and his rather wealthy background and repressed sense of violence.  What I don’t comprehend–though I need not, but rather accept what’s being given to me–is the teacher’s own violence towards Nakata on the day, just prior to the collapse of the children.

Interesting characters, presented in an interesting way.