For whatever reason, I’ve been “into” Asian novels lately. I guess I am just trying to bust out of that Western literary tradition.  I haven’t been all that enthusiastic with what I’ve read so far. I almost checked out Haruki Murakami’s latest, 1Q84, when I was at the library a few weeks ago, even though two stalwart readers told me they couldn’t get through it. Then I thought, hell, I’ll be at this for a few months (the novel comes in three volumes, to give you an idea) and I don’t have that kind of time or patience these days. Lying next to it, somewhat misplaced on the shelf, was Kafka on the Shore. A more modest single volume work, it not only appeared digestible, I knew it had received much acclaim since publication around ten years ago. If I had actually noticed the cover art, the kind of image that shows up at five in the morning, somewhere between the last bit of Rem sleep and the alarm clock, and so scares the crap out of you, the alarm is superfluous, if I had noticed, I would have probably let out a yelp that’d cause the librarian to wonder if the after-school crowd was let in early. If I could explain the image, I would. All I really knew about the novel was that the author was supposed to be one of those magical realism types.

This is a remarkable novel. And I grappled with why. I read lots of novels. I’ve read half a dozen since the start of the year. Why does this one stand out?

It stands above, I’ve decided, because it has an unnerving amount of energy but Murakami controls it, effortlessly, it seems, even as it emanates from four principal sources.

• Story energy – at the elementary level, it’s a coming of age novel. It reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye, one of the seminal coming-of-age stories of the last century, but kind of in the sense that an apple reminds me of apple pie. (Pie is the only food I will not share, just to give you a clue what I mean by that analogy). And I loved Catcher in the Rye! The fifteen-year old narrator who runs away (he’s two years younger than Holden Caufield) has similar experiences that make a man out of him. I thought Holden got to do mature things for his age, like stay overnight in Manhattan in a hotel and get roughed up by a pimp, but this guy, Kafka Tamura, well, let’s just say he manages to check himself into a library several hundred miles from Tokyo and that’s where his adventures start. He has the mountains to climb and the oceans to cross, but Murakami never belittles his quest with false heroics or manufactured outcomes.
• Archetypal energy – a great novel in the literary tradition has to artfully include those universal symbols common to all other great novels (“The river is life”). Kafka on the Shore has plenty of them. Not one of them hits you over the head reminding you how intellectual you are reading this. 
• Spiritual energy – this is perhaps the novel’s greatest strength. The feeling I got reading it was this: We humans, as we float in the ether of our lives, hope that we are anchored to some larger purpose, something eternal, something universal. Kafka on the Shore makes you know this, not just hope it. And yet I can’t say that it’s a novel of redemption or salvation. Never does it drift into the fantasy that life has a purpose that is fathomable 24/7 or, for that matter, ever makes itself fully apparent.
• Mythological, psychological, philosophical, and pathological energy – there’s incest, family rivalry, father-son and mother-son issues, adolescent dreams and fantasies, talking animals, prophetic simpletons and simple proletarians, abandonment, genetic and familial oddities, and strange coincidences reminiscent of Kazantzakis, Homer, Shakespeare, Kafka, Marquez, Swift, Faulkner, and many others no doubt I can’t name off the top of my head.

One way Murakami keeps this energy from exploding is through the novel’s structure. There are two primary interwoven stories, with parallel main characters. One is told in present tense using Kafka as the first-person narrator. The other is told in past tense using a third person limited or omniscient (sometimes hard to tell) narrator. Another technique is having the main characters connected back to a single event in the past, a tragic but bizarre incident that occurs towards the end of World War II. The anchor location for the story is a small library far from Tokyo in the hinterland of Japan, more of a research institution, funded by a wealthy landowner. What better place for a literary masterpiece to take place than where great stories ultimately reside for the rest of their lives? Can I tell you why structure and place keep the thing from exploding? No.

Does it have flaws? Probably. The only one I can think of is that the story is male-dominated. There are only two female characters and one, on reflection, seems like she could have been axed in rewrite, were it not that she heightens the overtones of incest, and the other almost seems a stand-in for all women-kind, a generic life-mother, an object of male sexual desire, the mythical librarian who is ravishing when she takes off her glasses, and so on. Then again, that’s something else I love about this book. Murakami employs these subtle and not-so-subtle references to popular culture and popular stereotypes that ground the story in everyday life, as mundane and unfortunate as that might be considered out of context.

In the end, I can’t really explain why I loved this book. It’s wonderfully balanced. What does that tell you? Nothing. It doesn’t stretch the credibility of any of its literary licenses, e.g., talking animals, a truck driver who learns to love Beethoven and philosophy, fragmented time sequences, a fifteen year old runaway mature beyond his years by a decade or two. Does that help you? Probably not. See if this helps. There’s something called the triple point in chemistry. It’s the combination of temperature and pressure at which a substance can exist as a solid, a liquid, and a gas. How many books have you read, will you read, that comfortably exists at the equilibrium of reality, dream, and imagination? To me, this is that sort of novel.