Chapter 6

Kafka On The Shore
By: Haruki Murakami


Chapter 6
The chapter starts out with old man calling out to this large, elderly black tomcat. The old man can talk to this tomcat and so they have a conversation. We find out that the old man talks in third person and that when he was little he had an accident and that's why he's dumb. The old man's name is Nakata and he decides to name the cat Otsuka because it helps him with his memory. We know he's handicap and that the government pays everything for him. On his spare time, people tell him to find their missing cat and in return he'll get money. This is how he meets Otsuka, because he's looking for a cat named Guma. Otsuka asks Nakata about his accident and what happened. He doesn't remember a lot but that he was in the hospital for a long time and then when he woke up he was like this. Otsuka tells him that his shadow is faint like something is missing, apart of them is missing and that he's seen that before in a person and they too could talk to cats like himself. The chapter ends with our two friends departing and going their own separate ways.


Important Quotes

"I had an accident when I was nine years old....I was unconscious the whole time....And when I finally woke up, I couldn't remember a thing" (51).

"Your problem is that your shadow is a bit--how should i put it? Faint. I thought this is the first time I laid eyes on you, that the shadow you cast on the ground is only half as dark as that of ordinary people. I ran across another person like that once" (51-52).

"What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow" (52).



Questions/Comments

This is a very strange book

I think that this old man was one of the boys on that hill when all the children were unconscious, maybe he was the little boy that went completely blank and had to be sent to the military hospital and the university hospital.

I also think that Plato's idea of each person having another half is true because that is what Nakata has to do, he has to find his other half for him to become complete.

It seems that if my predictions are right that all the kids who fell unconscious that day in the forest can talk to cats and that all of them too have their other half missing.