Kyle’s Reviews > Kafka on the Shore > Status Update

All excitement of the often graphic nighttime visits between Miss Saeki and Kafka is ickily tempered by the uncertainty over their familial relations. Even by the end of this affair, when he heads back to the mountain, it seems like they are destined to be in bed again. At least the police are making some connections between Kafka’s flight and Nakata’s quest for an entrance stone that might eventually be entered?

Just as the story had seemed to settle into a too-comfortable alteration between Kafka’s encounter with the living ghost and Nakata’s search for an unknown stone, Hoshino steps into the spotlight, led by the trickster Colonel Sanders for a wild ride with a philosophy-spouting sex worker. Like so much in the story so far, there is not much going on at the outset but so many finer details shaping up its inner life.

The two main storylines begin to converge with Kafka and Nakata at least sharing stomping grounds in Nakano before their paths diverged on a physical plane yet became more entangled at the subconscious level. Still not sure how marine life starts falling from the sky, how much of the Ancient Greek curse will play out for Kafka, or if his Oedipal doom is already two-thirds fulfilled. Good for Oshima remaining as a he.

Violence and sex make an abrupt entrance into the narrative: a blood-covered shirt here, a frisky night in Sakura’s bed there and a bit of both with Setsuko’s story of what really went down on Rice Bowl Hill. Nothing overtly nasty but like Kafka’s ride with Oshima into the mountain, potential for things to get really bad (or good) at any moment. Even Nakata picks up on this impending danger with Johnnie Walker.