47 She let the burden in her heart to vanish. It is because a record of
someone’s life is a symbol of happiness, laugh, cry, anger, hatred, problems of the owner of the record. Saeki is willing to cover her past and
start a new life. Unfortunately, the new life of Saeki is a life in a world without time. Thus, based on the analysis above, the writer finds that
Saeki’s love is borderless. Saeki’s love cannot be separated by a space and time.
2. Saeki’s Love For Kafka, Her Abandoned Son
The story of Saeki’s life is buried until a fifteen-year-old boy comes to the library in order to look his mother. His name is Kafka. In his
fifteenth birthday, Kafka decided to leave his father to meet his mother. His mother left him since he was a four years old with an unknown
reason. Kafka loves to read books and spends a lot of times in the library.
He finds peacefulness in the library and it is like a second home for him. Or maybe more like real home, more than the place I lived in p.36.
Therefore he comes to Komura Memorial Library. Saeki makes Kafka impressed from the first time he sees her. Since
Kafka does not have a place to stay, Oshima, Saeki’s assistant offers him a place. Kafka lives in a room at the library. The room was Saeki’s
sweetheart room. The room does not have any decoration at all, except
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48 for small oil painting, a realistic portrait of a young boy by the shore
p.182. It is the painting which was painted by Saeki’s sweetheart when both of them were fourteen. Saeki hangs the painting in the room to
remember him. The room is certainly a meaningful room for Saeki. It can be said as
the centre of her soul. While she is sleeping, Saeki’s living spirit leaves the body in the shape of a fifteen or sixteen girl. Kafka saw her entering
his room in the middle of the night. Her physical description is like the girl written in the lyric of Kafka on the Shore. She wears a blue dress
with a billowing hem. The length of her hair is about her shoulder. The girl is sitting at the desk, with her chin which is resting in her
hands. The girl is staring at the wall and thinking about something. She looks like lost in some pleasant and warm memory. Every once in a
while there is a hint of a smile gathers at the corners of her mouth p.228. The girl who is seen by Kafka is actually Saeki’s living spirit
who that leaves her actual body and becomes a figure of a fifteen-year old girl.
Some nights after the fifteen or sixteen year old girl came to Kafka’s room, Saeki comes to do the same thing as the girl. It was after
three. Kafka was awaked from his sleep because of her presence. She does what she usually does. She is at the desk, gazing the painting, her
head is in her hand.
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49
With a start I realize it’s Miss Saeki. I gulp and can’t let my breath out. It’s the Miss Saeki of the present. She looks at me for a while, quietly
concentrating like when she’s looking at the painting, and a thought hits me- the axis of time. Somewhere I don’t know about, something weird is
happening to time. Reality and dreams are all mixed up, like a seawater and river water flowing together. I struggle to find the meaning behind it
all, but nothing makes any sense p.292.
The fact that Saeki is sleeping but she walks and enters the room which is her sweetheart’s room indicates that actually the room is so
meaningful. In her sleep, Saeki comes to the room and gazing at the painting. She did not realize that Kafka was sleeping on the bed. When
she looked Kafka, in her imagination Kafka was her sweetheart.
Once she’s naked she crawls into the narrow bed and wraps her pale arms around me. Her warm breath grazes my neck, her pubic hair
pushing up against my thigh. She must think I’m her dead boyfriend from long ago, and that’s she’s doing what they used to do here in this
very room. Fast asleep, dreaming, she goes through the motions long ago p.292.
From the quotation above, the writer infers that Saeki is dreaming to make love with the one she misses so much. She is at a point between
the dream and the real life. She is dreaming and walking to Kafka’s room. She puts off her dress, crawls into Kafka’s bed, and she does what
she used to do with her sweetheart long time ago. She is unconscious when making love with Kafka. In her mind, the person who is with her
on the bed is her sweetheart. Therefore, she is letting her longing to her sweetheart, no matter if she is only dreaming. After satisfying her buried
desire, Saeki wears her dress and comes back to her room.
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50 From the fact that while she is sleeping, she wakes and comes to
Kafka’s room indicates that she suffers a walking sleep. She may also has an experience of “out of body” or OBEs. The phenomenon of “out of
body “ experiences OBEs are personal experiences during which people feel as if they are perceiving the physical world from a location outside of
their physical bodies Levitan and LaBerge, 1991. When Saeki experiences the walking dream, she does not realize and
memorize that she comes to Kafka’s room, gazes at the painting of Kafka on the Shore,
and finally makes love with him. If the condition of Saeki’s OBEs is related to Freud’s level of mental of life, it includes in
unconsciousness. As Freud 1964 states, Freud states that unconscious contain all those drives, urges, or instinct that are beyond people’s
awareness, but motivate most of our feeling, words, and actions. In her real life, Saeki feels that there are some similarities between
Kafka and her sweetheart when he was fifteen years old. The similarities are seen from Kafka’s face and hobbies. Saeki tells Kafka that he is like
her sweetheart.
“You know, you remind me of a fifteen-year-old boy I used to know long time ago.”
“Did he look like me?” I ask “You’re taller and more muscular than he was, but there’s a resemblance.
He didn’t enjoy talking with other kids his age- they were on a different wavelength- so he spent most of his time holed up in his room, reading, or
listening to music. He’d get the same frown lines, too, whenever the topic got difficult. And you love to read as well” p.260.
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51 There are no two people who are exactly similar. However, there may be
a possibility of a person who has dual identities, which means that in a way Kafka is fifteen year old boy and in other way, it seems that Kafka is
Saeki’s dead sweetheart who is experiencing reincarnation. Both Kafka and Saeki is attracted each other, however their love is
borderless. Kafka falls in love with a fifteen-year-old Saeki who comes to his room.
“And there’s another important fact: I’m drawn to that ghost, attracted to her. Not to the Miss Saeki who’s here right now, but to the fifteen-year-old
who isn’t. Very attracted, a feeling so strong I can’t explain it. And no matter what anybody says, this is real. Maybe she doesn’t really exist, but
just thinking about her makes my heart- my flesh and blood, my real heart- thump like mad. These feeling are as real as the blood all over my chest
that awful night p.234.
Saeki falls in love with Kafka because she sees the figure of her sweetheart in Kafka. Saeki sees some similarities between Kafka and her
dead sweetheart. She tells Kafka those things while remembering her sweetheart. Saeki sees her sweetheart in Kafka. It made Saeki was
interested in him. Saeki’s interest to Kafka makes her coming to Kafka’s room one
night after nine. It was not like some previous night, at that night she comes to the room consciously and is not dreaming. “I haven’t seen this
room in a long time,” she says p.310. In the real life, she has not seen the room in a long time. However, out of the real life, she came to the
room some previous nights.
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52 Saeki asks Kafka to walk through a pine forest in order to show the
sea around the Komura Memorial Library. She points a spot to the shoreline. She tells Kafka how her sweetheart paints the painting. The
way Saeki tells her life secret to Kafka indicates that she considers Kafka as a special person. It is because she usually tends to close herself from
other people. The proof can also be seen from the other conversation between Saeki and Kafka when Kafka brought her a cup of coffee in her
office. “W
hen I was fifteen,” Miss Saeki says with a smile, “all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place
beyond the flow of time.” …
“But you know,” she goes on, “when I was fifteen, I thought there had to a place like that in the world. I was sure that somewhere I’d run across the
entrance that world take me to that world.” “Were you lonely when you were fifteen?”
“In a sense, I guess. I wasn’t alone, but I was terribly lonely. Because I
knew that I would never be happier than I was then. That much I knew for sure. That’s
why I wanted to g
o- just as I was- to some place where there was no time” p.462.
If Kafka does not mean anything for Saeki, she will never tell him the secret that has been kept for more than twenty years. It seems that her
last happiness is when she was fifteen and her relationship was very beautiful. It is because afterwards she cannot see her sweetheart again.
She wanted to go to a place where there was no time because the only one happiness was at that time. A place where there is no time is a
metaphor of death. If there is no place like that in this world, therefore the place is in heaven.
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53 Metaphorically, Saeki’s life is ended at age twenty and she dies with
her sweetheart.
“My life ended at age of twenty. Since then it’s been merely a series of endless reminiscence, a dark, winding corridor leading nowhere.
Nevertheless, I had to live it, surviving each empty day, seeing each day off still empty. During those days I made a lot of mistakes. No, that’s not
correct- sometimes I feel that all I did was make mistakes. I felt like I was living at the bottom of a deep well, completely shut up inside myself,
cursing my fate, hating everything outside…I slept around a lot, at one point even living in a sort marriage…” p.410
When she was found die, at the same time but in a different place she appeared to where Kafka is staying to answer the puzzle whether she is
Kafka’s mother or not. The spirit leaves Saeki’s body and flies to visit Kafka. Saeki is Kafka’s mother. Saeki got married and has a son. When
her son was four years old, she left him. The proof that Saeki has a child and leaves him is shown in the following quotation.
“A long time ago I abandoned someone I shouldn’t have,” she says. “Someone I loved more than anything else. I was afraid if someday I’d
lose this person. So I had to let go myself. If he was going to be stolen away from me, or I was going to lose him by accident, I decided it was
better to discard him myself. Of course I felt anger that didn’t fade, that was part of it. But the whole thing was a huge mistake. It was someone I
should never have abandoned.” I listen in silence.
“You were discarded by the one person who never should have done that,” Miss Saeki says. “Kafka—do you forgive me?” p.462
From the quotation above, it is very clear that Saeki has ever got married and has a child. The reason why she decided to leave her child is
that she has a traumatic experience of losing a person she really loves. When Saeki was twenty, her sweetheart was dead. It leaves a very deep and
long sorrow.
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54 When Saeki finally got married and has a child, she decided to leave
the child when he was four. The motivation of leaving Kafka is not because Saeki does not love her child. However, it is because Saeki really loves the
child. This type of love is parental love as mentioned by Ellis 1954 that parental love is a love between parents and their children. She chooses to
leave first before the child is taken from her side. It seems that Saeki has a deep fear of losing someone whom she
loves. Therefore, the decision of Saeki, one of the major characters in Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, to leave her son when he was four year is
a way to escape from the fear. She prefers to leave her son first before he leaves her.
The decision of leaving her son is one of Saeki’s ways to escape from the fear of losing the beloved ones. It is a manifestation if Saeki’s
love, one of the major characters in Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.
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55
CHAPTER V CONCLUSION
This chapter consists of two parts. The first part, conclusions, concerns the answers of the questions formulated in the problem
formulation. The second part, suggestions, is divided into the suggestion for the future researchers and the suggestion for teaching-learning
process.
A. Conclusions
Based on the analysis in chapter four, this study finds the finding. There are two points to conclude the analysis in the Chapter IV. Firstly, it
describes the characteristics by Saeki, one of the major characters of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. Secondly, it deals with Saeki’s
manifestation of loving her dead sweetheart and Kafka, her abandoned son. Additionally, some theories such as the theory of character and
characterization, the theory of personality, the theory of motivation, and the theory of loved have assisted the analysis in this study.
The characteristics of Saeki, one of the major characters of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore can be seen from the personal
description, character seen by others, speech, thought, and direct
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