It's been a while since I've read a novel. True, I spent a week last summer in solitary confinement (i.e. parents stuck in another country, me alone in the homeland) devouring everything I could get my hands on, averaging one novel a day. But since then I hadn't picked up anything really, except to finish David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day. (And as predicted by Ms. Caswell, I'm currently on Year 2 of T.H. White's The Once and Future King)

It's no surprise then, in the confluence of a quarter-life identity crisis and nostalgia for past certainties, in the land of books and words I've grown up to appreciate (London), I was drawn back to an old love - print. I hardly knew where to begin this journey back and I cannot say that Murakami's Kafka on the Shore was on my top 10. I had picked up Norwegian Wood when I was 15 and while I related to it wholeheartedly for all its melancholy and despair, I've long since thought I was over all of that. Yet the book that I chose for no apparent reason, blasted me back, unawares, to a fervor for words, stories and implicit meanings I had forgotten since I started my professional life. (Although markedly different from Norwegian Wood, after Kafka on the Shore I think the former warrants revisiting)

John Updike may have been on point when he said "it seems more gripping than it has a right to be and less moving, perhaps, than the author wanted it to be" because even now I feel as if there's a flimsiness to it that is covered up by the trance it produced and I continue to be caught up in. With its ghosts, time shifts, deaths and heartbreaking loneliness, Murakami has blurred even my reality. I can't tell if what's elusive is a mystery that ought to be worked out or something that was never there in the first place. Nevertheless, despite it's jagged unity as a whole, there is no denying that discreet pieces of it are truly gripping and moving. Kafka Tamura describes his center of being:

Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart. [9]
It evokes a raw pain, wakes up childhood fears and invites old banished objects of anger. Reading it is, for me, going over to the edge. Plodding through it is walking through the labyrinth within and without. Does it soothe? I don't know.

Perhaps as with Norwegian Wood and the 15-year-old me, my current state of mind is beyond objectivity on this piece at this time. I, too, am feeling like a shell without a past or future, the subject or object of what is neither right nor wrong, an outcast, a foreigner in all this land.