And it wasn’t just the loose ends that caused me problems. Mitchell went on to say that: “For Murakami devotees, this fantasy’s loose ends will tantalise to his admirers, they may invite flummoxed interpretation but for the unconvinced, they will just dangle, rather ropily.”įor me, they’re dangling ropily.
Is Mrs Saeki really Kafka’s mother? (The answer, given to Kafka, is “you know the answer”.) Is Sakura, a fellow passenger Kafka meets early in the novel and “rapes” in a dream later on, really his sister? Did Kafka actually kill his own father in another dream using Nakata as an unconscious proxy? Is the Boy Named Crow, Kafka’s occasional companion, Kafka’s familiar, his superego, or his what? Is a giant evil slug crawling across a Takamatsu apartment an incarnation of Kafka’s father trying to enter the netherworld? The mythic motifs also remain frustratingly shady.
The wartime X-File is revisited only once, the UFO is never explained, and the spectral village between the worlds serves little discernible function, beyond being a place for Kafka to escape to and then a place to escape from. There were, as David Mitchell elegantly summarises, a lot of unanswered questions: The nearer I got to the end, the further I felt from grasping anything of any real weight. I’ve now finished Kafka On The Shore - but I don’t feel as if I’ve got much closer to getting to grips with it than last week.
0 kommentar(er)
