2006 World Fantasy Award – KAFKA ON THE SHORE by Haruki Murakami

I was wavering a bit way back when I decided to include the WFA winners, and I'm pretty sure that the inclusion of this book on the list is what decided the matter in the end.  Haruki Murakami is a fantastic Japanese writer who creates metaphorical stories about lost souls in the modern world.   Some people might compare his work to magical realism, but Murakami's magic is less subtle and often feels more sinister.

Murakami tells two parallel and related stories.  The first is that of the fifteen year old Kafka, who runs away from his home and oppressive father in Tokyo and comes to live in a small private reserach library in Takamatsu.  He falls in love with the distant librarian Miss Saeki and also grows close to a hermaphrodite named Oshima.  In the other story, a mentally handicapped man named Nakata has the ability to talk to cats.  He helps people in his neighborhood find lost cats by asking around for them, but one such quest exposes him to a horrific ritual that leads to a murder.  Nakata then heads off on a mysterious quest with a curious but decidedly unintellectual truck driver named Hoshino.

There are some very surreal scenes along the way, including an extended sequence with Colonel Sanders as a spirit guide.  There are also several pairings and twinnings rich with metaphor (Kafka's lost sister, his father, and the connections between Nakata and Kafka, or Nakata and Miss Saeki) and it all leads to a timeless world on the edge of reality.  It's an evocative but highly readable novel that's also an exciting (but perhaps unsolvable) puzzle.

Grade: A

1999 WFA – THE ANTELOPE WIFE by Louise Erdich

When playing the old genre definition game, one of the trickiest traps of all is dividing fantasy from magical realism. The latter is a rather distinctive genre, more closely identified with the realms of literary fiction than the speculative variety. The basic idea is to take a population and explore real-world problems like identity, poverty, or totalitarianism by adding a bit of folkloric magic. The genre came out of Latin America (Gabriel Garcia Marquez is probably its most famous practitioner) but subsequently spread into other regions. I don’t think there’s any question that this novel, which deals with the rough and tumble relationships of several Ojibwa Indians in modern Minneapolis through the lens of myth, fits the bill.

We begin with the story of a US cavalryman who takes part in a massacre of Indians on the Northern Plains, then, feeling deep guilt, miraculously nurses a child separated from her family in the chaos. We then turn to the story of an Indian trader named Klaus Shawano, who bewitches a strange, untamed woman that people dub his “antelope wife.” At the same time, we get a love triangle between Klaus’s brother Frank, Richard Whiteheart Beads, and Richard’s wife Rozina. The story is mostly told through a series of vignettes that shift focus from character to character. There are multiple twins, talking dogs, tragedy and comedy, and eventually we learn how the modern characters are descended from the characters from the massacre at the novel’s beginning.

Erdich’s prose is quite poetic and full of poignant one-liners. But, it did feel a bit disjointed in the end. The problem is this: I think to really appreciate this novel, I’d need to read it again immediately to better understand the characters in light of later revelations about them; however, the novel didn’t quite sell me on the idea that doing so would actually be worth my time. So, instead, I’ll probably set it aside somewhat dissatisfied, but I am interested in reading more of Erdich’s work (especially since she’s such a major presence in my local literary scene). I do like that WFA has recognized magical realism though – it’s a slight bit of genre-bending that gives the award a definitive identity – we’ll see another example in the next decade that is one of my favorite books of the past decade.

Grade: B