Kafka on the Shore

The U.S. military investigation report into the 1944 Rice Bowl Hill incident continues with the interview of a professor of Psychiatry, Shigenori Tsukayama. Doctor Tsukayama was ordered by the Japanese military to examine the children who fell unconscious during the Rice Bowl Hill incident. The group of psychiatrists, including Dr. Tsukayama, examined the children in mid-November 1944, after medical doctors were able to find nothing wrong with them. The only sign that anything had happened to them was that they had no memory of falling unconscious or of what had happened while they were unconscious. There were no physical effects, and the children all went on with their lives as if nothing had happened to them.

Once the military investigation concluded that the children’s conditions could not have been caused by poison gas, either by a Japanese experimental gas gone wrong or a deliberate American attack, only psychological causes remained. Dr. Tsukayama and a panel of colleagues were called in to examine all the children.

The psychological experts conclude that the children’s unconsciousness was a case of mass hypnosis, but they are not able to determine the cause or the trigger, other than the flash of light the children saw at the beginning of their fieldtrip. Just as a trigger causes the hypnotic state, a reverse trigger awakens a hypnotized person. Similar cases of mass hypnosis among schoolchildren had been documented in England and Australia.

Upon examining the unconscious Nakata, Dr. Tsukayama believed that Nakata’s unconsciousness might be a case of “spirit projection” (67), where the spirit goes off to complete a necessary or difficult task leaving the body behind. Japanese folktales, such as The Tale of Genji, are full of such spiritual journeys. Using the mass hypnosis theory, the psychiatrists tried many different ways to awaken Nakata. Nothing worked. One day, shortly after having blood drawn—some of which spilled on his sheets—Nakata woke up. Though he was medically healthy, Nakata’s memory and intellect were completely gone.

Kafka wakes up lying on the ground in the bushes near a Shinto shrine. He has no memory of how he got there. It’s nearly midnight on Wednesday, May 28th—a day Kafka has spent in the Komura Memorial library. He remembers going to the gym, the library, and the diner for supper. After that, his memory is a blank. His shirt is drenched in blood, and his left shoulder is terribly sore, as if something hit it.

In a panic, he calls Sakura, and she allows him to come to the apartment where she’s staying. She knows that he’s a runaway because she was once a runaway too, and she recognizes that in him. She asks him to tell her the whole story. He does. 

Nakata questions another neighborhood cat, Kawamura, about the missing Goma. He’s not getting much information from this cat, because they don’t seem to be able to understand each other very well. A sophisticated, intelligent Siamese housecat named Mimi steps in to help Nakata. She discovers that Kawamura has seen Goma in a nearby vacant lot, but that many naïve, hungry cats have disappeared recently from that lot. A tall man comes with tasty things to eat to lure the unsuspecting cats to him and then he shoves the cats into a sack and takes them away. They are never seen again. Kawamura and the other stray cats in the vacant lot believe that this man caught Goma and took her away in his sack. Mimi warns Nakata that the tall man is dangerous and that the world is a violent place full of people who enjoy torturing cats. However, Nakata does not comprehend violence, and he pays no attention to her warning.

Nakata goes to the vacant lot and waits.

Kafka tells Sakura the truth about himself, including his real age. He tells her that his mother took his sister and vanished when he was four, and he shows her the picture of his sister and him. He confesses that he has become violently enraged before—twice hurting other people—but never before has he woken up covered in someone else’s blood with no memory of what happened. He tells Sakura that his older sister was adopted before his parents had him. She reassures him about the blood, saying it could be someone’s nosebleed and nothing to do with him. He is not convinced, though he goes along with her thinking.

They settle down separately to sleep, but neither can. Sakura invites him to cuddle in the bed with her and tells Kafka to think of them as brother and sister. Both realize that she is the same age as Kafka’s sister. He becomes aroused as they cuddle. She says that she wants to help him relax so he can sleep, so she uses her hand to give him an orgasm. She then says that it would be nice if they really were brother and sister. She makes Kafka leave the bed so she can sleep.

When he wakes up in the morning, Sakura has gone to work. She left a note saying that there were no violent or bloody crimes reported on TV or in the newspaper. Kafka cannot stay with Sakura, because of his confusion over the nature of their relationship and his possible legal troubles. As a precaution, he checks out from his hotel over the telephone. He leaves Sakura a thank you note explaining that he cannot stay. He has no idea where he will sleep that night, but his intuition tells him that he should go to the Komura Memorial Library and something will just work out.

This chapter takes the form of a letter written by Nakata’s teacher, Setsuko Okamochi, in October 1972, concerning the Rice Bowl Hill incident. She addresses the letter to Dr. Tsukayama. In the letter she tells Tsukayama the truth about what happened that day before the children collapsed. She is compelled to tell the truth because the memory of that day haunts her. She is ashamed about the lies she told, which she is certain affected the investigation. Because she felt she couldn’t tell the Japanese military men the truth, she continued to lie when questioned by the psychiatrists, and then the Americans.

The night before she took the children up the hill, she had a vivid sexual dream about her husband, who was away in the army at that time. The dream was so realistic that even after she woke up and went about her day, eventually taking the children up the hill, she felt that she was still in that dream with her husband. When they reached the clearing to search for mushrooms, her period started suddenly and unexpectedly. She told the children to start hunting mushrooms and cleaned up the best she could with some towels. Preoccupied with the strangeness of the dream the night before, her mind a “complete blank” (100), she lose her composure out of embarrassment and shame when Nakata walks up to her with the bloody towels she had used and hidden in the woods. She slaps him repeatedly on the cheeks and yells at him. The other children stare in astonishment at what she is doing. She picks Nakata up from the ground where he has fallen and holds him tightly, crying out of fear, shame, and embarrassment, and begs Nakata to forgive her. That’s when the children collapse into a mass coma.

She describes Nakata before his coma as extremely bright and competent, with the best grades in the class. However, he was not happy, and he never laughed or smiled. She suspected that too much was expected of him and that he was probably exposed to violence at home. She particularly regrets her behavior because of this suspected violence. She knew that he would never trust her after that, and she had hoped that she would have a chance to make amends to him. That never happened, and she never knew what became of him once he was taken away to the military hospital.

She was not surprised to lose her husband later in the war, because ever since that day, she somehow knew that he was “fated” (104) to die. She feels that she “lost part of [her] soul in those woods” (104).