Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

I should probably stop reading Murakami for a while. The weirdness might lose its pique. Nonetheless, some observations from the latest read:

• I am starting to get the feeling that alternating stories by chapter is part of M's standard MO. What is interesting here is that the more realistic of the two threads, that of Kafka, is also the more contemplative and sober; the Nakata storyline is more comic. This is exactly opposite to Hard Boiled Wonderland, e.g., where the unconscious world is the peaceful one. Unsurprisingly, KOTS is most like that novel at the end, when Kafka's narrative turns decidedly fantastic in his hike out to the valley beyond time.
• Kafka's decision to read Soseki's collected works near the beginning of the novel is an excellent example of the reader's problem of never-having-read-enough. Many readers of the translated Murakami will have heard of I am a Cat, but few will have read it. Anyone unfortunately in such a position (such as myself) will be horribly frustrated, knowing that there is something up with the cats, but not knowing what--and, more importantly, not knowing if that what is important enough to justify moving Soseki to the top of one's reading list. One knows that this is neither coincidence, nor the tidy solution to what is much more than a roman à clef. So: not only does one not know how to interpret, but one doesn't even know how to posit the scope of interpretation. Chasing down the technicalities in a Murakami novel is itself a Kafkaesque enterprise.
• Best sex writing ever:
  "Henri Bergson," she replied, licking the semen from the tip of his penis. "Mame mo memelay."
  "I'm sorry?"
  "Matter and Memory.You ever read it?"
  "I don't think so," Hoshino replied after a moment's thought.
• This novel contains one of the best uses of second-person narration that I have ever seen. It is only engaged in in a few of the Kafka chapters, and Murakami slips it in unobtrusively, often after the internal dialogues with the "boy named Crow." Far from the usual effect of the second person in establishing quasi-totalitarian demands for empathy by the reader, it primarily serves to enhance the basic theme of Kafka's multiple possible identities (itself an odd take on the possibilities of youth). The harshness of the vocative lingers only in the undercurrent of suspicion, also developed organically from the theme, that fate precludes even the option of interpretation.