Kafka on Shore

I just finished reading Kafka on the Shore, one of the best reads I've ever had for ages. It really had been a long time since I last took a thick paper back book, sat, read and finished the whole thing. I did not finish it in one sitting though, it took me the whole summer to finish just this one book. I think I've lost my affinity to lengthy novels since the last novel I successfully finished was Peter Pan -- that was good too, after all, I am in love with Peter Pan and the thought of there being a real Peter Pan; anyway this particular novel needs to be talked about in another blog -- so going back, yeah, my affinity for thick, lengthy novels have dwindled down to almost nothing.

At the end of each chapter, I felt that connection to the characters, that odd experience of a metaphysical level was definitely there however underplayed it was in my life at that time... it was undeniably there. Oddly so, at first I felt that this book might not have been for me, it lacked the sheer excitement that I got from Anne Rice and her vampires and odd little action scenes. It lacked the feel of being thrown into the realities of another person's life which I got from Paulo Coelho, or that warmth and pain you feel in love from Nicolas Sparks. Yeah, I have such a small and cliched  repertoire of authors. But they are the ones I read.

I was almost to the half of the book thinking, this is not doing it for me, I can't seem to really enjoy it. Not that he wasn't good at telling his story or that the plot was a bore, I just felt like I wasn't excited, that's all. But I read on, thinking that if I always stopped reading in the middle because nothing excited me, my view of the whole thing would always be incomplete, like how I did with Pullman's The Golden Compass. So a little touch of maturity on my part (yehey for me). And true enough, the book proved to be more for me than what I first thought of it. 

I was somehow in the same situation when I read this. The same feeling like wanting to run away from something and start over somewhere else. And the story kind of grew on me, not like the feeling you get from watching strong big waves crushing against the rocks, but more like how you come to like the gentle breeze of a warm day, that neither blows through your hair or sweeps up your skirt, just a silent blow as gentle as a whisper. Anyway, my metaphor's bad so I'll put up something that helped me through that weird situation I was in. 

"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. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine. 

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. 

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about." 
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)