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Hello everyone, I'm Meiya.
Among Japanese writers, the most favorite is Haruki Murakami, and last time I shared his "Norwegian Forest", many readers said that they liked it.
Today, May also wants to share his other book that explores the spiritual growth and spiritual freedom of modern people, "Kafka by the Sea".
This seems like a bizarre story. There was a teenager, when he was young, who was predicted by his father that he would "kill his father and marry his mother."
Can he get rid of this Oedipus complex spell? Will he be able to grow up? Let's take a look.
Author: Ten o'clock water clear
Learn to be with yourself: Being alone is a practice
Kafka by the Sea alternates between the stories of two characters, both advancing in parallel and permeating each other.
The protagonist, Kafka Tamura, is a fifteen-year-old boy who was abandoned by his mother, who ran away from home at the age of four. His father was koichi Tamura (i.e., Jonny Walker), a very talented local sculptor.
From an early age, Kafka experienced mental abuse from his father, who predicted:
Sooner or later you will have to kill your father with those hands, and sooner or later you will have to have sex with your mother and sister, a fate that you cannot escape no matter how you try.
In order to find his mother and sister, and to escape the mantra of "killing the father and marrying the mother", he has been planning to run away from home.
It took him years of preparation to get the plan to work: to take classes in earnest, to exercise consistently in the gym, and to read voraciously in the library.
Finally, on the eve of his fifteenth birthday, he left Tokyo and his father with only a sum of money and some daily necessities, got on the bus alone, and went to the strange Shikoku, where he hid in the Komura library every day.
I put on my jeans, put on a long-sleeved shirt over my T-shirt, and walked outside. It was just after five o'clock in the morning, and there was no one around.
Pass by old neighborhoods, through pine forests that serve as windbreaks, and climb over tidal banks to the coast. The skin hardly feels windy.
When you were young, could you have such a stage? Always pretentious, but often jumping between pride and inferiority, looking back, the world is vast, time is vast, single shadow, alone but drooling.
So I often feel an impulse in my heart to run far, to "pass through the old neighborhood" alone, to "walk through the pine forest as a windbreak", and to "come to the coast".
We are so desperate to have someone who can understand the boundless loneliness in our hearts, and a place to show our unique talents.
When the desire to be alone comes, it is a critical moment of growth.
Author Zhou Guoping said:
People often see communication as an ability, but ignore that solitude is also an ability, and in a certain sense is more important than communication.
Conversely, not being sociable is certainly a pity, and being impatient with loneliness is not a serious flaw.
A man who is not good at solitude must have a noisy and barren world, and his life lacks depth and breadth.
Solitude is a practice. A person listens to music and meditates, a person counts the past while traveling, a person reads a book of poetry and talks with an interesting and profound soul...
Learn to be alone, in order to see their strengths and weaknesses, so as to obtain self-correction and improvement, and ultimately grow.
Learn to be with others: Get positive guidance
In the Komura Library by the sea, Kafka met Oshima, and from this, he was given the position of assistant in the library and gradually came into contact with the librarian, Zob.
Zob is an elegant woman in her 40s with a mysterious background.
As if guided by the darkness, Kafka suspected that Zob was the mother who had run away from home.
Again and again, in his dreams, he met the "ghost" of his young Zob, and finally one night, he had a relationship with Zob who was asleep.
Another main line of the novel revolves around an old man named Satoshi Nakata.
He suffered a bizarre coma in his childhood, woke up and lost his mind, became illiterate, and had difficulty communicating with people, and could only communicate with cats.
Incredible things often happen everywhere you go, such as fish and leeches falling from the sky.
One day, Nakata encounters a man who calls himself Jonnie Walker brutally torturing and killing cats, and he can't stand it and shoots him out of control.
And Jonny Walker was the sculptor, Kafka's father.
The two clues merge together, and the time Nakata kills the cat abuser is exactly the time when Kafka dreamed that he killed his father.
When Kafka woke up to find his hands covered in blood, he remembered his father's prophecy and suspected that he had killed him in a dream, and he felt terrified.
Fate seemed to have played a joke on him, no matter how far he fled, he could not escape the torture of fate's cloudy hands.
Subsequently, Nakata opened the entrance stone to the other world, which was also the entrance stone for Kafka's return to the other world, and Kafka walked into the forest for the second time.
In fact, he had lived in the forest before, and Oshima persuaded him to return to social life when he picked him up.
Perhaps, everyone has a peaceful paradise in their hearts to escape the storms and rains of the world.
However, as Oshima said:
Nature is unnatural in a sense, comfortable is threatening in a sense, and successful acceptance of this paradox requires corresponding preparation and experience.
When Kafka walked into the forest for the second time, he was led by two soldiers who had disappeared in World War II, trying to take him into an isolated world.
In that other world, Kafka met his "mother", Zoe. He wanted to live in this world, but finally returned to the real world under the persuasion of Zob.
In the process of our growth, we sometimes encounter obstacles that we can't get through in our hearts, want to close ourselves off, and want to escape to an independent world that we think are isolated from the world.
At this time, we are very weak and helpless, and we need someone to guide us out of the predicament of life.
For Kafka, his indifferent father was an obstacle to his growth, and Oshima, Soboro, and Nakata were all positive guides on his growth path.
Oshima, in particular, was undoubtedly Kafka's spiritual teacher, who helped him analyze all kinds of inner confusion and brought him to understand and understand the world.
These people are like a beam of light, illuminating his originally dark heart, allowing him to go from ignorance to knowledge, and finally bravely integrate into the real world, and finally gain redemption.
Kafka was lucky to have a life guide, and Nakata, who had an equally unhappy childhood, was not so lucky.
Nakata, who was confronted with cold domestic violence and ridicule from those around him, did not run away from home, but pinned his hopes on female teachers.
However, although the female teacher realized that Nakata was different from other children, she did not protect him, let alone guide him spiritually. Her violent slap made Nakata completely shut himself up.
Nakata eventually died in sleep.
Learn to live with the past: Shake hands with hurt
Entering the forest, for Kafka, is an important step in growth.
He hesitated and hesitated before entering the "forest", but curiosity and a desire to explore eventually drove him into a new world.
Yes, growth requires courage, good or bad, young hearts always want to break through.
There, he was away from the hustle and bustle of the world, giving him time to think about all the past alone.
He repeatedly asked why his mother had abandoned him and why he carried his father's cold genes. He trekked through the forest, and his ghostly crow revealed the possibility that his mother had abandoned him.
Later, deep in the forest, Kafka once wanted to give up his life, or escape life in a way of forgetting.
Perhaps, each of us carries the wounds of our original families to a greater or lesser extent, but blindly accusing and complaining or even abandoning ourselves will make our lives completely a tragedy.
After all, the faults of our parents cannot be undone, and our young and precious lives can be self-correcting.
As the inner monologue in the book goes:
Young, tenacious, and malleable, you can bandage your wounds and move forward with your head held high. But she (the mother) had no choice but to continue to be lost.
Growing up, there are some pains that we have to face and must solve. Only by facing it directly can we shake hands and make peace with the past; only by resolving the pain can we have the strength to move forward with our heads held high.
Perhaps, our past life was chaotic, but the so-called growth is to learn to get along with the past and learn to be responsible for our own lives.
In the end, Kafka bravely stepped out of the forest and entered real life at the request of his mother. He tried hard to forgive his mother and reconcile with the past. It takes a lot of courage.
Since then, he has been "the most tenacious fifteen-year-old teenager". As for the meaning of life, what his parents did not tell him, he would eventually find out for himself.
How like the youth of each of us, nervous and brave and fearless into the cruel and beautiful adult world, trying to abandon the pain of the past, failing again and again, and summoning up the courage to clean up the old mountains and rivers again and again.
After being wounded all over the body, I suddenly looked back at the thorny road and knew: Originally, this is called growth.
At the end of the book, Kafka completes his union with the Crow Boy and completes the strange journey.
Even if you are still lonely in the end, as if you have returned to the original point, the two kinds of loneliness are already different. He has come from the storm of growth and has been reborn from the fire.
As stated at the beginning:
A man walked in the desert, and inexplicably a whirlwind blew, enveloping the person and scaling it all over his body.
After enduring the past, the desert was silent, as if nothing had happened, but only the man himself knew that he had become different.
Everyone's experience is growth
The writer He Wei said in "Finding China":
The real sense of private geography is the experience of everyone— when all the landscapes enter the human emotions, there must be a point of convergence. A crack in the human heart is where the light of nature shines in.
Each of us is an island and needs to be alone to experience the ups and downs of life, "through old neighborhoods, through pine forests that serve as windbreaks, and over the tide banks to the coast." ”
After that, after victory, we grow.
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Background music | "These Ethereal Words"
Image credit | Weibo @ Zuo Jian -
-Author-
Shui Qing, ten point reading and a number of platforms signed author. He is good at writing the past of the Republic of China and the old dream of "The Red Chamber" with temperature and depth. WeChat public account: Shuiqing's Bagua Republic of China (shuiqing2018). This article was first published at Ten Point Reading (ID: duhaoshu), a national reading number subscribed by more than 29 million people, reprinted, please reply to "reprint" in the background.
Appreciate the new sun, ten o'clock reading signed anchor. When the night is dark, I will tell you a story, a voice. WeChat public account: listen to the sound of qingqing (ID: sxqreading).
May also reads a book with you every day