Kafka on the Shore

Blake, the impetus for today's story.

So I was rereading Kafka on the Shore, one of my favorite books by Murakami.

And in it, just a small little moment, he listens to Sergeant Peppers.

We've done a lot of Beatles talk on this podcast in the last couple of months, and it got me thinking a little bit.

Actually, I think I may want to come back to Zack's observation later in another episode.

There are ghosts in Yasunari Kawabata's Palm of the Hand story, Fushi, in Banana Yoshimoto's Hard Boiled and Hard Luck, and in stories in Dead End Memories, in Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, Fumiko Enshi uses horror elements from Noh in her novels, especially masks.

As we discussed in an early episode, The Smile of the Mountain Witch, Minako Oba is just one of many 20th century Japanese women writers to use the Japanese folk witch Yama Uba in her writing.

And actually, a lot of the Japanese women's writing we discussed in our last episode uses elements of horror.

You've got these billion dollar companies like Anthropic who are training models.

And there's the ethics around like stealing written books and using them to train your models and then giving these models out to the world.

And this is a big problem space that I sit in.

pretty much every day.

You have someone who has to verify what's going on.

Somebody who has to articulate in a conference.

You have people who need to write textbooks.

You have people who need to teach the subject.

Yeah, like, I still, like, it's weird because, like, the stuff that I've read is, like, I liked it, but having got, like, like an old shit, like...

I'm starting to think that maybe it's more like Vonnegut to me, where just, like, the big books, like the Kafka on the Shore, Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Hard Boy Wonderland, like, maybe those were just so good that I kind of blinded myself to the ones that aren't as good.

But then I did start getting into ones like, uh... uh something in the west and i forget it was like a romance one not good i don't even remember if i like sputnik sweetheart that much like i obviously don't remember it so i started to get into the other books where i was like ah not great like norwegian good uh norwegian wood is basically just uh a literary maybe more romance book with a hint of like magical realism just a very touch nothing really weird and like that one I think is what made him famous really and that was pretty good but everything else is not written like that

And also, like, I haven't really read, like, a lot of what I guess you consider, like, magic realism.

So you can still read the really good ones.

So you're saying the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was pretty good?

yeah i would read kafka on the shore next uh well i mean well it's cheap chase for you because you want to finish that trilogy right uh yeah i hardboiled wonderland i think you'd really enjoy too because that's in the name like hardboiled kind of detective it's fucking weird i think the guy goes into this underground cavern and goes to this weird library where he has to like make dreams oh something

like just fucking

I know he's very disliked.

However, what I love about, for example, Kafka on the Shore is like one of the most magnificent books I have ever read in my entire life.

What I love about Kafka is, is the world building, the insane plots and like the stories.

So if I can get that from other authors, then that's what I'm looking for.