He is a devout disciple of Chekhov's idea that 'if a pistol appears in a story, eventually it has to be fired'. His singular skill as a novelist lies in creating hallucinatory landscapes in which everything has an internal logic and much has the cool erotic intensity of fantasy. The fun and drama of Murakami's storytelling is that you are never quite certain where those dreams end and where reality begins. Kafka Tamura wants to escape from this fate but, in his dreams, of course, is drawn towards it. He is haunted by the oedipal prophecy his psychotic dad gave to him when he was seven: that he would end up killing his father and sleeping with his mother and his sister. He leaves home, heads south and ends up working in a curious library in the provincial town of Takamatsu. He does not know why they went, or where, and the quest of the book, and one of its various whodunits, lies in his vague, compulsive attempts to find out. When he was four, Kafka Tamura's mother left home with his sister. Theseus-in-chief on this occasion is Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old in the Tokyo suburbs, who lives with his father, a brilliant and fearful sculptor. It is, for Murakami, our fate to find a safe (and amusing) passage out of the life that fate has made for us. There are along the way several acts of disembowelment - Johnnie Walker, for example, has a taste for eviscerating stray cats - and mostly they lead to the conclusion that all of our mazes lie within us. In several places in Kafka on the Shore, characters discuss the origin of the word labyrinth, dwelling on the notion that it has its roots in the ancient habit of laying out the disembowelled guts of an enemy on the sand to divine the course of the future. Here there are monsters in the guise of Johnnie Walker, a malevolent, bottled-up spirit complete with tall hat and tails, and Colonel Sanders, who takes shape as a riddling pimp in a white suit selling sex and possibility in a side alley (with not a chicken wing in sight).
In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, there were the possessed healer Nutmeg Asakasa and her mute son, Cinnamon. In A Wild Sheep Chase, it was a demonic would-be ruminant with world domination on his mind. His minotaurs come in all shapes and sizes. His characters are always searching for something and mostly that thing is the emergency exit from his stories. A recurrent obsession in the books of Haruki Murakami is the idea of the labyrinth.
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