Kafka on the Shore

Author: Haruki Murakami

• Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step.

• Same with the engine, its monotonous sound like a mortar smoothly grinding down time and the consciousness of the people on board.

• It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

• She seldom talks about herself, instead letting others talk, nodding warmly as she listens. But most people start to feel vaguely uneasy when talking with her, as if they suspect they’re wasting her time, trampling on her private, graceful, dignified world. And that impression is, for the most part, correct.

• “Kafka, in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”

• “Electra, by Sophocles. A wonderful play. And by the way, the term gender was originally used to indicate grammatical gender. My feeling is the word ‘sex’ is more accurate in terms of indicating physical sexual difference. Using ‘gender’ here is incorrect. To put a linguistic fine point on it.”

• But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they’re doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don’t want to.

• “Listen, Kafka. What you’re experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn’t choose fate. Fate chooses man. That’s the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy—according to Aristotle—comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist’s weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I’m getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results.”

• “Picture a bird perched on a thin branch,” she says. “The branch sways in the wind, and each time this happens the bird’s field of vision shifts. You know what I mean?” I nod. “When that happens, how do you think the bird adjusts?” I shake my head. “I don’t know.” “It bobs its head up and down, making up for the sway of the branch. Take a good look at birds the next time it’s windy. I spend a lot of time looking out that window.

• “The stone itself is meaningless. The situation calls for something, and at this point in time it just happens to be this stone. Anton Chekhov put it best when he said, ‘If a pistol appears in a story, eventually it’s got to be fired.’

• “Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover.

• All that was visible was the rear of the building next door. A shabby, miserable sort of building. The kind where shabby people spend one shabby day after another doing their shabby work. The kind of fallen-from-grace sort of building you find in any city, the kind Charles Dickens could spend ten pages describing.

• A shabby, miserable sort of building.

• “Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real bind. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free.”

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined civilization as when people build fences. A very perceptive observation. And it’s true—all civilization is the product of a fenced-in lack of freedom. The Australian Aborigines are the exception, though. They managed to maintain a fenceless civilization until the seventeenth century.

• I have to get stronger—like a stray crow. That’s why I gave myself the name Kafka. That’s what Kafka means in Czech, you know—crow.”

• “The strength I’m looking for isn’t the kind where you win or lose. I’m not after a wall that’ll repel power coming from outside. What I want is the kind of strength to be able to absorb that outside power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things—unfairness, misfortune, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.”

• I’ve always been a great fan of the Chunichi Dragons, he thought, but what are the Dragons to me, anyway? Say they beat the Giants—how’s that going to make me a better person? How could it? So why the heck have I spent all this time getting worked up like the team was some extension of myself?

• A lot of people compare him unfavorably to Bach and Mozart—both his music and the way he lived. Over his long life he was innovative, to be sure, but never exactly on the cutting edge. But if you really pay attention as you listen, you can catch a hidden longing for the modern ego. Like a far-off echo full of contradictions, it’s all there in Haydn’s music, silently pulsating. Listen to that chord—hear it? It’s very quiet—right?—but it has a persistent, inward-moving spirit that’s filled with a pliant, youthful sort of curiosity.” “Like François Truffaut’s films.” “Exactly!” the owner exclaimed happily, patting Hoshino’s arm reflexively.

• Do you know where the idea of a labyrinth first came from?” I shake my head. “It was the ancient Mesopotamians. They pulled out animal intestines—sometimes human intestines, I expect—and used the shape to predict the future. They admired the complex shape of intestines. So the prototype for labyrinths is, in a word, guts.

• The longer people live, the more they learn to distinguish what’s important from what’s not.

• Berlioz put it this way: A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.”

• You’re telling me my mother loved me very much. I want to believe you, but if that’s true, I just don’t get it. Why does loving somebody mean you have to hurt them just as much? I mean, if that’s the way it goes, what’s the point of loving someone? Why the hell does it have to be like that?”

• “You know what I should do?” Hoshino asked, excited. “Of course,” the cat said. “What’d I tell you? Cats know everything. Not like dogs.”

• Cats know everything. Not like dogs.”

• But inside our heads—at least that’s where I imagine it—there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards.