Kafka on the Shore

Hoshino and Colonel Sanders scramble over the wall around the shrine’s property and venture into the woods. Colonel Sanders explains that he is a non-corporeal being and needs Hoshino’s help to complete a task that is important to him. Colonel Sanders is neither god nor Buddha, nor does he have human feelings or substance. They enter the shrine and the room where the entrance stone sits. Colonel Sanders instructs Hoshino to take the stone and place it by his bed. Things will just happen from there. Hoshino is very superstitious about stealing the stone from a shrine and believes he will be cursed. Colonel Sanders says that he has “connections” (287) and can assure Hoshino that he will not be cursed.

Hoshino returns to the hotel by taxi and places the stone next to Nakata’s head, not his own, just in case there is a curse. He falls asleep and dreams of the god Pan. Nakata wakes at 5 a.m. and sees the stone.

For the third day in a row, Kafka takes an early afternoon coffee upstairs to Miss Saeki.

Kafka confesses his theory to her: his father never could get over losing Miss Saeki or perhaps couldn’t get over the fact that he could never really make her belong to him, so he wished to die. He planted the curse in his son’s mind so that his son would kill him and sleep with his mother and sister.

Miss Saeki acknowledges that according to his theory, she would be his mother. She asks how his father died, and Kafka answers that he was murdered, but not by him. She asks why his father put him under that curse. Kafka answers that his father wanted him to take over his father’s will; to want to be with Miss Saeki. Kafka confesses that his father’s curse has been successful; he wants to sleep with Miss Saeki. Further, Kafka confesses that he’s in love with both the young Miss Saeki and the present-day Miss Saeki. She asks him to leave, but instead he stands up and touches her hair.

Miss Saeki confesses in turn that she’s simply ‘’waiting for death to come’” (294). She admits and she should have stopped living, but she didn’t. She ended up wasting time and hurting others, so that now she believes she’s “’under a kind of a curse’” (295), where all she can do now is despise herself because she once had something that was perfect and now it’s gone. She knows that her time is coming.

Kafka asks her where she got the two strange chords for her song. She admits that she got them in “’an old room, very far away. The door to the room was open then’” (295). He leaves and shuts the door.

He goes out to dinner with Oshima. They discuss love, and Oshima admits that he has a partner.

Miss Saeki returns to the library that night. She takes Kafka to the shore to show him the place depicted in the painting. As they sit there together, Kafka becomes Miss Saeki’s dead sweetheart. She asks why he had to die, and Kafka answers as Komura. From this point on, they are both dreaming, though their actions also take place in the real world. They return to Kafka’s bedroom and make love. She cries, and then she leaves. 

Nakata wakes up and sees the stone at 5 a.m. He examines it and says that there will be thunder today. Then he gets ready.

When Hoshino wakes up at 8 a.m., Nakata is exercising. They get breakfast. Nakata doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with the stone, so Hoshino tells him about Colonel Sanders and getting the stone. Nakata tells Hoshino that there will be thunder today, so they should wait for that before doing anything else about the stone.

They go back to their hotel room, where Hoshino watches television and Nakata mutters to himself and occasionally rubs the stone or his head. Around noon a thunderstorm starts. Nakata asks Hoshino to stay with him, because something strange might happen. Nakata reveals that he knows he’s empty inside and that he didn’t used to be that way. He now remembers that he used to be normal; he remembers that he wasn’t always empty like he is now. He wants to be “’a normal Nakata’” (307). He tells Hoshino, “’I want to be Nakata with his own ideas, his own meaning’” (307). He has to get the other half of his shadow back.

Nakata explains that he has to be the one to open the entrance because he’s the one “’who’s gone in and come out again’” (308), or left this world and come back again. Because Nakata is empty, he believes Johnnie Walker entered him and made him do Johnnie Walker’s will, made him shed blood. 

Nakata asks Hoshino to flip the stone over, but warns him that the stone is a lot heavier than it was. A series of tremendous thunderclaps shake the earth, and Hoshino thinks that “somebody opened the lid to hell” (310). He struggles and strains and heaves and with a tremendous effort manages to lift the edge of the stone enough that it flips the rest of the way over under its own weight. Nakata announces that the entrance has been opened.