Summary
Out searching for Goma, Nakata chats with a brown striped cat he decides to call Kawamura, and a Siamese named Mimi. The human and cats discuss a shared fondness for eel and tuna. Mimi informs Nakata that Goma has been seen in the area, but also that a “bad person” has been taking cats and stuffing them into a bag. Mimi guesses he uses them for scientific experiments and warns that the man, who wears a tall hat and long leather boots, is highly dangerous. Nakata goes to the grassy lot to wait for Goma to appear. He tries to picture the man. He watches the lot, drifting off as he waits.
In Sakura’s apartment, Kafka finishes telling her about how his mother left home with Kafka’s older sister, who was adopted, when Kafka was four. Kafka admits that he sometimes flies into a violent rage. Sakura gives him a clean T-shirt and guesses that maybe the blood came from a nosebleed he had. They go to bed together, but she says she has a steady boyfriend in Tokyo and so won’t have sex with him. Despite this, she holds him, and Kafka gets an erection. She pulls down his boxers and strokes his penis while asking him if he wants to meet his sister, who is six years older. He says he supposes he does. She rubs his penis until he ejaculates into a tissue. Sakura says it isn’t sex, she’s just helping him relax. She asks him to sleep in a sleeping bag. In the morning, she leaves a note saying there was nothing on the news about blood or a shrine. Kafka tidies the apartment up, calls the hotel to say he won’t be returning, and sets out for Komura Library, where he feels fate is drawing him.
The twelfth chapter picks up the Rice Bowl Hill plot with a letter from October 1972. Setsuko Okamochi writes to a psychology professor to say that when they met during the investigation, she couldn’t be fully honest because of the military officers present. Setsuko admits she had a sex dream about her husband the night before the incident, and woke up feeling as though she had really made love. While out picking mushrooms with the schoolchildren, she suddenly began menstruating. Embarrassed by the amount of blood, she went to the woods and cleaned herself up with towels. She hid the towels, but soon Nakata was walking towards her with the towels in his hands. She became livid and began slapping and hitting the boy. He collapsed while all the children stood watching in shock. She was confused and distressed when he wouldn’t wake up, and then the other children collapsed too. She writes that Nakata was one of her brightest students, but he never seemed happy or cracked a smile. She believes he grew up with a violent family. She says she feels as if she left part of her soul in the woods that day.
The narrative returns to Kafka, who speaks with Oshima at the library about literature. Kafka trusts Oshima with the information that he doesn’t know where to stay. Oshima says he will ask Miss Saeki if Kafka can stay at the library, but for now Oshima will find somewhere else for him. After the library closes that evening, Oshima drives Kafka in his green Miata into the forest. They listen to classical music. Oshima talks of his hemophilia; getting into a crash isn’t an option for him because he could easily bleed to death. Oshima brings Kafka to an off-the-grid cabin that Oshima’s brother built. Oshima says he will come back in a couple of days; in the meantime, the forest is all his.
Nakata visits the grassy lot, hoping to see Goma, for several days. He stops by the home of the people who hired him to search for Goma to give updates on the search, pretending that he is receiving information about Goma from other humans and not cats. One day a large black dog emerges from the thicket. Nakata follows the dog to another neighborhood, eventually being led into a dark living room where Nakata meets the cat catcher. He looks like and calls himself Johnnie Walker, saying that he borrowed the whiskey brand’s mascot for his appearance. Nakata is unfamiliar with the brand. Johnnie Walker says he has Goma but that he needs Nakata to do something for him. Johnnie Walker says he saw Nakata talking to cats and knew he was the person he was looking for for some time. Nakata has difficulty understanding much of what Johnnie Walker says.
Left alone in the cabin, Kafka tries to sleep but feels sensitive to sounds and feels as though he is being watched. The boy called Crow taunts him about being childishly scared. In the morning Kafka collects water from the stream, cooks breakfast, and takes off the shelf a book about the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. Kafka reflects on how Hitler and the Nazis had “twisted dreams” with severe consequences. Kafka feels that he is responsible for what happens in his own dreams, thinking of his bloody T-shirt and the consequences that have yet to reach him. Kafka goes into the forest, remembering the Oshima warned him to keep the cabin always in sight. He follows a path that gets progressively narrower, turning back when the cool forest air unnerves him. He listens to music, eats, works out. The next day he returns to the forest, going further on the path, feeling less helpless. He runs naked through a rainstorm and works out again, feeling calm. However, Crow’s voice reminds him that he cannot escape what happens in his dreams, and says he might dream of raping his mother and sister. Crow says Kafka is “afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams.”
At Johnnie Walker’s house, Nakata opens the fridge and discovers it is full of frozen cat heads. Johnnie Walker admits he severed the heads, but not out of cruelty. He is collecting cat’s souls “to create a special kind of flute.” Johnnie Walker says he wants to cut off Goma’s head, but he knows Nakata wants to bring the cat home safe. In exchange for Goma, Johnnie Walker asks Nakata to kill him, because Johnnie Walker is tired of living but can’t kill himself. Nakata says he can’t kill Johnnie Walker. Johnnie Walker begins pulling cats from a bag to cut out and eat their hearts. Nakata stands frozen in horror as he watches Johnnie Walker kill Kawamura. When Johnnie Walker pulls Mimi out of the bag, Nakata loses control of his body, picks up a steak knife, and stabs Johnnie Walker in the stomach and chest. Johnnie Walker laughs and congratulates Nakata as blood spurts out of his mouth. Johnnie Walker collapses in a bloody pool. Nakata goes into shock, but is relieved to find Goma in the bag. He holds Goma and Mimi but doesn’t have the strength to stand up from the sofa. His mind fades and he drifts into darkness.
On his third night in the cabin, Kafka feels at peace with the silence and darkness of the forest. He is less scared of the woods. On the fourth morning, Oshima arrives while Kafka is sunbathing nude. Oshima drives him back to the cabin and the two discuss the Greek tragic figure of Cassandra, who had the power of prophetic vision but the curse of never being believed. Oshima reveals that Kafka will be a staff member and live at the library, in charge of opening and closing the place and performing minor day-to-day tasks. Oshima tells Kafka about how Miss Saeki used to be in love with the eldest son of the Komura family, and that they were inseparable. When he attended university in Tokyo, she wrote a love song called “Kafka on the Shore” and recorded it in Tokyo in 1970. The song was a hit, but Miss Saeki’s boyfriend died during a protest. Miss Saeki never sang again, and Oshima says it as though her life stopped at twenty, normal time ceasing to have meaning for her. Oshima also tells Kafka that he will be staying in the room in the annex where Miss Saeki’s boyfriend lived as a young man, when he was Kafka’s age. Miss Saeki used to visit him there, and they likely made love.
It is nighttime, and Nakata has woken face-down in a vacant lot. Although he remembers killing Johnnie Walker, there is no blood on him. He has Goma and Mimi, but he lost the ability to speak with the cats. Mimi scurries off and Nakata brings Goma to her owners; they give him money and leftovers. He goes to the police station and politely tries to turn himself in for committing a murder. He tells every detail faithfully, but the officer assumes the absurd details are nonsense. Before leaving the station, Nakata tells the cop that it will rain sardines and mackerel the next day. Sure enough, the prophecy comes true, and the officer turns white as a sheet as he watches the fish fall from the sky like hail. The point of view stays with the officer as he learns that a famous local sculptor was killed with a steak knife and found in a pool of his own blood. The officer decides not to tell his superiors about Nakata’s confession. The narrator reveals that Nakata is no longer in town.
Oshima sets Kafka up in his new bedroom and shows him his new tasks at the library. In his room is a painting of a boy on a shoreline, presumably the young man Miss Saeki loved. The next day two women come to the library and start complaining to Oshima that the facility doesn’t have men’s and women’s bathrooms, only a shared restroom. They say they are from a women’s organization and are touring public facilities to point out issues of gender discrimination. Oshima responds with condescension, defending the library and saying they are targeting the wrong place if they want to advance Japanese women’s rights. They accuse him of being a typical patriarchal male, and Oshima reveals that his body is female, but his mind is male. He shows his ID card to prove he is legally considered female. He says that he “emotionally” lives as a man, and is attracted to men, using only his anus for sex, never his vagina. The women leave, flabbergasted. Oshima tells Kafka that everything he said is true, and that he doesn’t understand what he is. Oshima speaks of the discrimination he has faced and says the women represent the type of small-minded people he can’t stand.
Analysis
Using the strange ability to communicate on the borderline between worlds that he gained after his childhood coma, Nakata speaks with neighborhood cats in order to track down a missing cat named Goma. While speaking with Kawamura and Mimi, Nakata learns that a mysterious figure has been coming to steal cats in the area. Nakata waits for the inevitable encounter with the man, staying in the grassy lot Goma was last spotted, behaving as a cat would.
Meanwhile Murakami shifts to reveal more of Nakata’s origin story with a letter from his schoolteacher to a professor. In the letter, Murakami touches again on the theme of taboo sexuality with Nakata’s teacher’s admission that she didn’t tell the military investigation that she had struck Nakata several times because he had found her menstruation towels during the class outing. She theorizes that she got her period so suddenly and with such intensity because of the vivid sex dream she'd had about her husband, who was away at war. The shame she feels at her secret being exposed causes her to hit Nakata so hard that he falls into a coma. Similarly, the other children—having witnessed the traumatic scene and lost something of their innocence—fall unconscious as well. With these details, Murakami builds on the relationships between the themes of taboo sexuality, subconscious desires, and the metaphysical.
Nakata’s already peculiar storyline becomes even more surreal when a black dog, who also can speak with Nakata, leads Nakata to the home of Johnnie Walker, a self-described metaphysical entity who exists beyond ideas of good and evil, and who is more of a concept from the parallel other world than an actual being. Johnnie Walker takes the form of a famous whisky brand logo in order to communicate with Nakata in the physical human realm. Ironically, Nakata doesn’t recognize the Johnnie Walker brand, having no desire to drink.
Johnnie Walker reveals that he has been stealing cat souls to build a “flute,” a concept that only makes sense in the parallel other world and whose mechanics or purpose are beyond Nakata’s comprehension. Johnnie Walker speaks of how he has been seeking someone like Nakata—i.e. someone who exists on the borderline between worlds. Only someone like Nakata can end Johnnie Walker’s life, because Johnnie Walker is also an entity divided between worlds. Although he doesn’t want to, Nakata feels an ineffable sense of duty build within him that results in him stabbing Johnnie Walker. In an instance of situational irony, Nakata tries to turn himself in to the police for the murder. Even though he tells every story faithfully, the police assume he is making things up. At this point Nakata reveals another strange talent: he can predict that fish are going to rain from the sky.
In Kafka’s storyline, the theme of taboo sexuality arises during Kafka’s evening at Sakura’s apartment. Having explained his backstory to her, Sakura invites him into her bed and he, despite himself, gets an erection. She proceeds to bring him to orgasm with her hand, all the while dismissing the seriousness of the sex act by saying it's simply to help him relax. They also simultaneously discuss his long-lost sister, and Kafka wonders if she may be Sakura. Returning to the library, Kafka admits everything to Oshima, who accommodates Kafka’s need for refuge by bringing him to his family’s cabin, where he gradually becomes used to being alone with himself and his thoughts.
Upon returning to the city, Kafka begins staying in a spare room at the library that once belonged to Miss Saeki’s boyfriend, from whom she had been inseparable until his death. Oshima explains that time seemed to stop for Miss Saeki upon her boyfriend’s death. Like Nakata, some part of her soul seemed to leave her to wander in another world. In the 1970s, Miss Saeki captured the love she felt for her boyfriend in what became a hit song, coincidentally titled “Kafka on the Shore.”
When harassed by two women who accuse him of sexism, Oshima reveals that he is transgender. Sexed female at birth, Oshima speaks of himself as having the mind of a man and the body of a woman. He lives as a man and is attracted to men. Oshima seems to worry that Kafka will judge him now that his gender identity isn’t a secret, but Kafka accepts Oshima for who he is.
