Kafka on the Shore

Kafka returns to the library on Wednesday morning, after finding an inexpensive gym and working out. He thinks that his muscles will help to disguise his young age. Kafka explains that he’s named himself Kafka because he believes that he’s actually living inside the execution device described in Franz Kafka’s short story, “The Penal Colony.” Kafka continues reading The Arabian Nights and reveals that his favorite place to be is alone “inside the world of the story” (59).

Kafka spends the next seven days repeating the same schedule: morning workout followed by a day of reading in the library, then returning to his hotel after eating a cheap dinner. He records his activities in his journal. He reports that on the eighth day, this simple existence is blown apart.

The U.S. military investigation report into the 1944 Rice Bowl Hill incident continues with the interview of a professor of Psychiatry, Shigenori Tsukayama. Doctor Tsukayama was ordered by the Japanese military to examine the children who fell unconscious during the Rice Bowl Hill incident. The group of psychiatrists, including Dr. Tsukayama, examined the children in mid-November 1944, after medical doctors were able to find nothing wrong with them. The only sign that anything had happened to them was that they had no memory of falling unconscious or of what had happened while they were unconscious.