Kafka on the Shore

Nakata reaches Kobe with his youthful driver, Hoshino. Hoshino buys Nakata some breakfast and drops off his load of furniture, leaving Nakata in a small park by the sea. When he returns, he knows that he cannot abandon the old man, who reminds him of his own grandfather. Hoshino’s grandfather was an important person in his life, a loving and helpful man, who never judged Hoshino’s wild, bad behavior. Hoshino feels that he will be honoring his grandfather by helping Nakata reach his goal.

As Nakata sits by the sea, an omniscient narrator retells the story of Nakata’s life from the time he woke up after the accident to the present. After his accident, Nakata was ignored by his family and never made any friends. Once he graduated from elementary school, his parents sent him away to live with his grandparents and attend agricultural school. He was beaten up and bullied so badly that his grandparents pulled him out of school and kept him at home.

At this point, Nakata learned that he could speak to cats; he worked on learning the language and soon had many cat friends. At 15, his grandparents found a place for him as a woodworker’s apprentice in a small furniture factory. He did well with the routine tasks, and he stayed there until the owner died and the factory was sold when he was 52. He had a small retirement pension from his 37 years at the factory and his savings to live on, until a cousin swindled him out of them. Penniless and friendless, his youngest brother finally stepped in and helped him. This brother gave Nakata a room in an apartment building he owned in Tokyo and arranged for Nakata to receive a small subsidy for the mentally challenged from the government. Nakata lived like that for 10 years, until Johnnie Walker came into his life.

Hoshino returns from dropping off his load of furniture and tells Nakata that he’ll accompany him on his journey. They are off to catch a bus to Shikoku.

Kafka awakes to find a “ghost” sitting at the desk in his room in the library. A beautiful young girl, about 15 years old, sits with her chin in her hands staring out in his direction. She’s wearing a blue dress and no shoes or socks. After a while, she seems to look at Kafka; then she gets up and leaves. It’s 3:24 a.m.

In the morning, as they prepare to open the library, Kafka asks Oshima to get him a recording of “Kafka at the Shore.” They dig out an old record player from a storage room, and after lunch Oshima brings Kafka a copy of the record he got from his mother. From the picture on the record jacket, he confirms that the young girl he saw in his room was Miss Saeki at age 15. Kafka has fallen in love with Miss Saeki’s 15-year-old self. He asks Oshima if he believes that people can have a ghost while they are still alive. Oshima tells him of the Japanese folktales about “living spirits”—souls able to leave their bodies behind to act out their—usually unconscious—desires. Typically, these living spirits are motivated by negative emotions or evil. Kafka wants to believe that love is the motivation for the living spirit he saw in his room.

Kafka listens to “Kafka on the Shore” once Oshima and Miss Saeki have left for the evening. The lyrics are strange and surreal, and very suggestive somehow of Kafka’s own life; he is certain that the Kafka on the shore from the song is same as the young boy in the painting on his wall. Two unusual chords in the song chill him like an icy breeze. He goes to sleep, eager to see 15-year-old Miss Saeki again.

Nakata and Hoshino arrive in Shikoku. Nakata says that he needs to go to sleep, so Hoshino finds a hotel. They check in, and Nakata tells Hoshino not to be alarmed if Nakata sleeps for a long time. Then he lies down and immediately falls asleep.

While Nakata is asleep, Hoshino thinks about his grandfather getting him out of jail multiple times when Hoshino got in trouble as a teenager. He never thanked his grandfather for that help, and his grandfather became senile and died of cancer the same year that Hoshino joined the Self-Defense Force. Hoshino has always been hot-headed and prone to getting into fights.

Nakata sleeps for 34 hours straight: waking on the second morning before Hoshino. Nakata fixes Hoshino’s back, pressing on a bone that was out of place, causing excruciating pain that quickly fades.

Nakata says that they need to travel on to Takamatsu. They take a train to Takamatsu, and eat bowls of udon noodles when they arrive. Nakata says the next step is to find the “entrance stone” (240), but Nakata has no idea where it might be.