At first read, Haruki Murakami’s novels are pure, prose delirium - beautiful, baffling fantasias layered with riddles. Talking cats, skies that rain fish, wrinkles in time where the lives of plain-spoken truck drivers and ghostly soldiers merge and diverge – Murakami’s often otherworldly tories can be instantly recognizable and seemingly unknowable.
So it goes in Steppenwolf Theatre’s alternately maddening and gratifying “Kafka on the Shore.” Adapted from Murakami’s novel and directed by Frank Galati, the piece is gorgeous, poetic and enigmatic. Like James Joyce’s equally challenging “Ulysses,” every action, every character and every place and object within Murakami’s densely, double-plotted story symbolizes something else. Scratch the surface and you find your peering down endless, twisting rabbit holes of myth, legend and subtext.
It’s fitting that there are two twined plots to “Kafka,” since early on, the piece invokes Plato’s Symposium. In that bit of ancient storytelling, Plato describes how humans were once male and female at once, both sexes joined perfect unity in a single being. Eventually, the gods grew angry and used lightning bolts to split everyone in two. The result was a race comprised of individuals destined to roam the world seeking their lost other half.
There are two seekers in “Kafka on the Shore.” The first is the 15-year-old title character, a runaway who takes flight in an attempt to escape a prophecy that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother. His Oedipal wanderings are alternated with the story of Nakata, an elderly, manchild left mentally impaired by an inexplicable childhood accident. In addition to leaving his mind damaged, the accident left Nakata with the ability to talk to cats, and so he spends his days seeking out lost felines – and secret stones that will allow him entry to vast, unknown worlds.
“Kafka on the Shore” requires that you succumb to those unknown worlds – and to the notion that there are mysteries you aren’t apt to unravel. There’s no point in fretting and frowning trying to make sense of a dream – or the dream-like worlds of Galati’s searing stage pictures.
Through Nov. 16 at the Steppenwolf Downstairs Theatre, 1650 N. Halstead; $20 - $70; 312/335-1650.
For more information, go to http://www.steppenwolf.org/
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