I finished kafka on the shore. I didn’t like the last half of the book. I remember I felt the same thing about some of his other books. That is, that he’s carrying to much cultural baggage around in his books. It’s too japanese, obsessed with purity.
But at the same time he’s determined at being unconventional, which is something I commend. The problem I faced was about halfway through the book I stopped liking Kafka, I couldn’t stand the parts with him in it. I just wanted to read about the old man and his friend. Similary I didn’t like Ms Sueki.
Those parts reminded me of Yukio Mishima’s writing, except not nearly so well crafted as Mishima. You don’t like the characters in Mishima, but there’s something about it that keeps you reading. It’s brutal, beautiful and ugly.
I just couldn’t get out of my head this obsession with having a way to fit into the world. Something to hold onto, to build your identity. I don’t agree with it, I think it’s an illusion. Kafka Tamura didn’t have anything like that and he was obsessed with that. That is something that I don’t think Franz Kafka was like.
I think we build fences to feel safe, not to create meaning. Building an identity from some way of fitting into the world. Deciding who you are, that is building fences.
People fear not having an identity, not knowing who they are. Kakfa in this book feared that. He was constantly going on about being lost. I just wanted to smack him and tell him to take his teenage problems elsewhere I’m sick of them. At least admit that’s what they are.
Not that I am dismissing teenage angst over identity. I know what it’s like believe me. I just wish I could find a story which took it deeper. I once had a moment when I was directly asked, “Who are you? What is it that makes you, you?”
It’s a deceptive question. It sounds simple. I just say, “I’m me”. I’ve always know who I am, I think. Then I think about it a bit more. I wonder what other people would say. I’m a banker, I’m a nurse, I’m a teacher. Assiociating themselves with their lifes work. I didn’t have a life work so I knew that that couldn’t be done, and that that couldn’t be it. The answer lies inside the mind, I’d never really gone past my randomly reactionary concious mind.
But identity. What is that anyway. Almost by definition it’s an anchor to mundane. Maybe it’s just a way of communicating with the world around us. It’s just the product of whatever our experiences have been so far. So the real me is underneath that layer. After all if my identity changed over time I’d still feel like me. That feeling is something other that all the niceties on top.
That’s what bugs me about Kafka Tamura, I feel like he’s obsessed with having something to hold onto. I’d be interested in his journey if he was looking beyond that.
I had this feeling that life is like a fern tree. Each branch growing out over the top of the old ones. The old ones dying and dropping off. There is no single trunk, you can’t smooth the mistakes into a single line. You have to accept the mistakes and actions of the past and build on them wherever you are. You have no choice.
Identity is the illusion from a distance that the trunk of a massive tree that is our minds (built like a fern tree), is just one single solid trunk. Smooth and seemless. We are rough, jagged, patchwork, uneven, ugly. And yet we continue to grow, dealing with each moment thrown upon us.
