Kafka on the Shore: Who Believes Nakata?
Reading Note: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
This essay discusses selected passages from the novel, including major plot developments.
Nakata, the elderly man who speaks with cats in Kafka on the Shore, recommends an umbrella to a policeman even if the following day is sunny. This sounds considerate until he specifies what it will protect him from: sardines, with a few mackerel. The policeman laughs and suggests turning it upside down to catch dinner, unwittingly repeating the detail that will let him check the prediction against tomorrow's event. Murakami places the coming impossibility in the memory of a listener with a reason to remember its exact contents.
Beside the localized strangeness of After Dark and Pinball, 1973, the fish shower opens the impossible into public life. The young runaway who calls himself Kafka Tamura discusses the execution machine in “In the Penal Colony” with Oshima, a library assistant. Murakami makes that affinity explicit while sustaining a world with its own confident movement. When the fish fall, their consequences keep developing long after the startling image has been delivered.
The umbrella advice comes at the end of an unsuccessful confession. Nakata has told the officer that he killed a man, and the officer initially reaches for a form, checks the time and begins recording the statement. When Nakata cannot supply the written characters of his own name, the pen is laid down and the effort to record what he says begins to falter. The officer wants to finish his paperwork and meet a colleague for a drink; a long, improbable account now threatens to keep him at his desk.
Nakata's manner has already become familiar to us: he refers to himself by name, explains his limitations, apologizes for inconveniencing people and tries to keep matters in order. When he asks a cat to accept the name Otsuka, he explains how a name will help him remember when and where they spoke, while the cat finds the arrangement cumbersome and prefers smell and shape. A spoken name helps him preserve an encounter; the officer requires written characters before he will proceed. We hear the patient effort inside Nakata's speech before he uses it with the officer.
That difference in acquaintance affects the confession. We can follow Nakata's attempt to preserve a recollection before he forgets something important, while the officer sorts him into a familiar category of troublesome visitor. His doubt has a visible reason, too: Nakata describes a bloody killing while wearing spotless clothes, a discrepancy the old man himself finds baffling. Yet the officer's response is to pretend to complete a form about Nakata's subsidy, converting a request to report a killing into something easier to dismiss. The forecast reaches this particular listener after the failure to record has already occurred.
The fish rain in Kafka on the Shore
The next day's fish arrive inside a sentence that recalls the prediction: “sure enough.” The narration carries us forward with Nakata's warning still available, and the exact species can be checked against something said before their arrival.
From that remembered warning, the narration spreads across the shopping district, where some two thousand fish strike the street, vehicles and roofs, and a few survive to flop on the ground. Investigators look for missing stocks, aircraft and weather explanations; the Health Office examines specimens and finds ordinary sardines and mackerel, although the police still warn people against eating them. The widening account follows an investigation that can identify what has fallen while failing to explain how it got there.
Television brings another appetite. A woman whose cheek has been cut is glad it was not a tuna, and a reporter grills fish and regrets having no radish or rice to complete his meal. Their responses take up the narrative space that an explanation of the shower might have occupied: the event becomes reportable through an injury, a joke and a demonstration for the camera. Fish can be held up, shoveled aside and tasted, with each use providing another way for people who never heard Nakata's warning to encounter what it foretold.
The policeman's earlier joke now has an uncomfortable counterpart in his own thoughts. If he tells his superior that an old man predicted the shower, the story could circulate through the precinct and make him ridiculous; if he supplies the rest of the visit, he will have to explain why a confession of murder went unrecorded. The narration enters the calculations of a witness with information the public investigation lacks. As he considers the cost of supplying it, he recognizes that his omission could bring disciplinary consequences.
At this stage, the officer thinks the murder story might be true because a prediction he dismissed has been fulfilled. It leaves the figure Nakata calls Johnnie Walker, the dead cats and the collection of souls unexplained. Murakami preserves that gap within the policeman's anxious reasoning; possibility is already enough to make his neglected duty troubling.
Before that suspicion leads anywhere, cleanup occupies him. Scales cling to the street despite hosing, bicycles slip on the wet surface, and the smell keeps the neighborhood cats excited for days. Murakami briefly leaves the officer's thoughts for these stubborn remains, with traffic to direct and the disruption to manage. Practical work interrupts his reconsideration of a visit that he had dismissed partly because it interrupted his paperwork.
The body is discovered the day after the fish fall: a sculptor has been stabbed to death, with a time and manner of death that make the earlier report credible to the officer. Now he believes what Nakata told him, thinks back to the action he should have taken—referring the confession to his superiors—and decides to “clam up and pretend it never happened.”
The concealment has a cause we can follow closely. New evidence makes the officer's earlier negligence harder to excuse, increasing his incentive to keep the visit out of the account. These returns to his thought progressively entangle belief with responsibility, until the narrator's access to him becomes indispensable: we know what his silence will omit because we heard the confession before watching him suppress it.
Nakata’s teacher and the missing testimony
Nakata's childhood has been presented through a different set of records. In 1944, sixteen children on a mushroom-gathering outing lose consciousness. Fifteen recover within hours; Nakata remains unconscious much longer and wakes with his memory and ability to read gone. Murakami approaches this event through fictional military interviews, with dates, document numbers, missing-document notices and assessments of the people being questioned. The form invites us to inspect testimony collected by others.
The doctors' observations are detailed, and their hypotheses have boundaries. As ordinary causes fail to fit the symptoms, the psychiatrist entertains mass hypnosis but acknowledges that he cannot identify its trigger; later, even the suggestion of a departing spirit is accompanied by hesitation over the lack of scientific proof. The inquiry remains legible through those examinations and exclusions, with its limits recorded alongside what it can establish.
In a letter dated 1972, the children's teacher changes what that inquiry could have known. “In other words, in the official investigation I intentionally changed some of the facts about the incident.” Shame and fear kept her from describing a sexual dream, unexpected menstruation and the bloody towels Nakata found. She struck him when he brought them to her, before the children collapsed. The professional interviews were conducted with a witness who had withheld these facts and repeated the omission after the war.
The letter alters our reading of the earlier pages retrospectively, because their numbered documents could preserve careful measurements while carrying an incomplete account of what happened on the hill. Murakami places the missing information in another form of testimony, written decades later by someone who has spent those years remembering. Even as doctors examined the children's inability to recall, an adult who could remember was withholding part of their experience.
Her admission brings a human action into view without establishing the medical cause of the mass collapse, and its late disclosure distinguishes her from the policeman. She eventually chooses to tell someone what she has concealed, while he acquires a reason to continue concealing. The narration makes both decisions accessible to us, so that the completeness of a record comes to depend on conduct we have been allowed to follow.
The novel continues to press for meanings elsewhere. When Kafka and Oshima read the newspaper report of the fish, their conversation tries out coincidence and metaphor; later Kafka finds falling fish in a song and studies its suggestive connections. The argument that the two narratives resist a final synthesis concerns this larger uncertainty. Within the officer's episode, the narration has nevertheless supplied enough knowledge to make an evasion intelligible. We can distinguish the unanswered connection from the conduct taking place around it.
The fish and Nakata's missing memory exert a stronger pull here than the apparitions. They draw us toward the kind of uncertainty offered in different ways by the two moons of 1Q84, Eri's sleep in After Dark, the mysteries of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, the painting in Killing Commendatore and the uncertain walls of Murakami's cities. We can remain absorbed in these different kinds of uncertainty without making a final explanation the condition of that pleasure.
With the teacher, Murakami allows a withheld account to reach us decades late; with the officer, he lets us hear an account before its listener decides to keep it from his colleagues.
Sources
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, translated by Philip Gabriel. Principal passages: chapters 6–8, 12, 18, 21 and 23.
Gabriel Chin, “Magic Realism as Metaphysics: Murakami Haruki and the Resistance of Reality Itself,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 49.1–2 (2022), pp. 38–39, on the major narratives' resistance to a final synthesis.
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