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Kafka on the Shore is a metaphor. It follows no rules, it doesn’t adhere to reason, and applicability is not an issue. It fills you up, it tears you down. A fugue of emotions are present, you can’t seem to figure out which of the many different realizations flooding you is most important. Waves roll up again and again on the beach of your consciousness and at first you resist, but after a while you understand that your struggle is pointless, so you give in. You read, you feel, you try to understand, you try to make sense. And you know what? You love it.

I don’t think I can adequately get the gist of a Murakami experience on a goodreads review. It’s something else, something you have to experience for yourself. I will try, but I know I shall fail. You have to realize that reading Murakami requires a unity of perception and feeling. I can try to make you understand certain concepts found in the book, but I will fall short on the sensory part. Murakami’s strength is the feeling he wraps around his teachings. He’s a surrealist painter, a musician, an oddity that weaves consciousness with pop-culture and makes it work. People say his works are easily accessible yet elegantly complex, I whole-heartedly agree. His style is so rich and resonant that it can dabble into lunacy without any sort of urgency. He isn’t regulated in any way, a writer free from normative paradigms and moral constraints. He’s pretty strange, but trust me, it’s awesome the way he writes. Okay, I’m gonna stop myself here. All I’m going to say is try it, experience it. See for yourself.

This novel is shared between two people’s inter-connected tales of self-discovery. A damaged fifteen year-old named Kafka, an illiterate and magical old-man named Nakata, one fleeing from something, the other searching, one looking forward, the other looking back, one with a bright future ahead of him, the other with a dark past. Two very different people, yet their fates are intertwined by something so inconspicuous.

As I said, Murakami hurls many different things at you at break-neck speed. He can talk about fate one minute, then drop it and talk about imperfection the next. It’s kind of messy at times, but the cumulative effect is still pretty solid. It’s like he’s packing everything in a mumble-jumble of thoughts that confusion is a constant. But when you sift through his words, you find that your confusion is more of feeling than an actual state of mind. You understand him perfectly, but you can’t put into words the emotion inside you. Stunning is I think the closest word possible to describing it. For me, though, the thing that stood out the most was his ode to time.

“Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.��

Time is an important concept. It is correlated to love and memory, two other topics that are central in Murakami’s points. You see, some people when they find love and are at their happiest, they want to freeze time and live in that moment forever. But what they have to know is that a moment alone will lose all meaning. The present is useless without both the past and future. You cannot appreciate something without knowing how you got there nor understanding that something will come out of it. The past gives a history, the future a possibility. Time is thing of beauty. Life without it is like air, you exist but you are stagnant and boring. With it, it is like the wind, moving, dancing, flowing into the unknown. But not only that, time makes love possible, because love takes time.

“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.��

Aside from love, time also makes one important thing possible. Memories. “If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.�� It allows us to store things inside our minds so that we can cherish them as long as we can. It permits us to remember those that have been, those that build up who we are. Because each person is shaped by the cumulative memories that he or she makes. Whether they may be happy or painful or boring, they mold us into who we are. Identity is slowly transformed over time, with our memories playing a vital role.

“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.��

Our identity, no matter how much time and memories change it, some part of it will stay the same. There are things that are unchangeable, things that will make you look into the past and see the same thing now. But, there are things that we purposely hold on to that hurt us, things that we hide in us and contain through time. Things that we can let go of, but we don’t, even if it is painful. A time will come when you will have to let go.

“In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.��

“As long as there’s such a thing as time, everybody‘s damaged in the end, changed into something else.

“But if that happens, you’ve got a place you can retrace your steps to��

“Retrace your steps to?��

“A place that’s worth coming back to.��

As I finish this review, I’m very excited. Yes, I know that I’ve got my memories to look back to, but what I’m excited about are those memories that haven’t been made yet. The future is ahead of me, I’ve got time on my hands. The possibilities are endless.