Du Tử Lê and My Kafka on the Shore

I spontaneously snapped this candid photo of my Dad as he pensively gazed into the boundless horizon where the azure sky promises a secret rendezvous with the crystalline sea - an gentle summer day along the tranquil coast of Maine.

I didn’t know why I felt compelled to capture this photo in its impromptu moment, until upon retrospect, I realized that this serendipitous frame subconsciously triggered my memory of one of the scenes from Dad’s favorite books - one of the hundreds and hundreds of stories he has shared throughout our lives, sometimes as bedtime tales:

“A young man named Tử. His legs paralyzed. His hauntingly sorrowful eyes forever gazing at the distant sea, searching for nothing and everything,” Dad passionately recounted his favorite short story from the immortal Vietnamese poet Du Tử Lê, his literary hero. “That scene is forever etched in my memory, and impacts my writing style to this day,” Dad expounded.

Dad can’t remember what he ate for breakfast this morning. But he will always vividly recounts the scene of Tử, the young man with paralyzed legs whose haunting eyes are as deep as the ocean that melds into the yonder blue horizon until they, he, and those sorrowful eyes, all blur into one beautiful canvas of nothing and everything.

As for me, I’ve never read any of Du Tử Lê’s work, but Dad’s passion for literature rubbed off on me, and one of my favorite novels is “Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami. Although written decades after Du Tử Lê’s story, “Kafka on the Shore” seems to eerily continues the the tale of the boy named Tử:

“Kafka sits in a chair by the shore,

Thinking of the pendulum that moves the world,

it seems.

When your heart is closed,

The shadow of the unmoving Sphinx,

Becomes a knife that pierces your dreams.

The drowning girl's fingers

Search for the entrance stone, and more.

Lifting the hem of her azure dress,

She gazes---

at Kafka on the shore. “

So was I compelled to snap this photo because I wanted to recreate the scene of the boy named Tử that has entranced Dad for 5 decades? Or did I subconsciously want to capture my own Kafka on the Shore? And was Haruki Murakami inspired in any way by Du Tử Lê? Are we all just connected in the end by an unbroken stream of consciousness?

And perhaps that unbroken stream of consciousness is a beautiful canvas of nothing and everything after all.