Kafka on the Shore

Nakata wakes up in the vacant lot he was staking out. Goma and Mimi are licking his face. They are talking to him, but he can no longer understand what they are saying. He has no blood on him, and he is in no pain. He returns Goma to her family, the Koizumis.

Next, Nakata confesses at the nearest police station to the murder of Johnnie Walker. The policeman cannot make sense of Nakata’s story, and seeing that he has no blood on him, refuses to believe him. He sends Nakata away. As he is leaving, Nakata tells the policeman to bring an umbrella to work the next day, because fish will fall from the sky like rain.

The next day when fish fall from the sky in the Nakano Ward, the young policeman realizes that he probably made a mistake. The day after the fish fall from the sky, a famous sculptor is found stabbed to death in his house. The young policeman knows then that he’s probably let a murderer go free. But Nakata has already left town.

Oshima returns with Kafka to the library and helps him to get settled into his room in the library, then leaves. Kafka notices a painting of a young man on the seashore, who looks about 12 years old. Kafka immediately imagines that this painting is of the young man Miss Saeki loved who was beaten to death at age 20 and that he is staying in the room that used to belong to that young man.

Oshima arrives the next morning, Tuesday, to explain Kafka’s duties, such as opening up the library each morning.

During the day, two feminists from a women’s rights organization ask to speak to the management about their opinion of the library. Oshima offers to listen to them. They accuse the library of sexism because they have no separate bathroom facilities for women and the male authors are all listed before the female ones in each section of the library. Oshima tries to be patient and hear them out, but as their accusations continue, and they accuse Oshima of being a “typical sexist patriarchic male” (178), he becomes angry.

Oshima reveals that he cannot be a sexist male because he is biologically and legally a woman. Further, he considers himself a gay man, rather than a lesbian, because he prefers to live as a man and is attracted to men. The women and Kafka are flabbergasted.

Kafka tells Oshima that he doesn’t care what Oshima is, he likes him. Oshima says that he just wants to be treated like a human being, just like everyone else. He continues to say that what he cannot stand are “hollow men” (181), or people who are devoid of imagination, or empathy. He reminds Kafka that people like that murdered Miss Saeki’s boyfriend.

Nakata gets out of a truck at the Fujikawa rest area. He has his canvas bag and umbrella with him. He has been hitchhiking from Tokyo, and now looks in the rest area for another ride. He comes upon a motorcycle gang beating someone up, and tries to intervene. They begin to turn on him, and he becomes emotionally overwhelmed, remembering how he killed Johnnie Walker. He steps back and puts up his umbrella. Leeches rain down from the sky on the rest area. Nakata runs inside to get help for the young man lying on the ground. He gets a ride further west with a young man in his mid-twenties, who is wearing an aloha shirt and a Chunichi Dragons baseball cap.