We are encouraged to contemplate this notion further through the words of Oshima – the senior librarian at the Komura Library. His most powerful abstraction in this novel originates from his notion that Kafka’s dreams become progressively more autonomous than his waking experiences. But was it really just a dream? Murakami is teasingly vague. Our teenage protagonist becomes infatuated with the beautiful and reclusive manager of the Komura Library, Miss Saeki, and in dreams Kafka begins an intimate and physical relationship with a girlish, spectral Saeki. It is through Kafka’s dreamscape that this is materialised. Kafka on the Shore’s plot orbits around what has been described as the ‘intersection of the nostalgic, the linguistic, and the magical’ a middle ground between the past, waking reality, and the subconscious mind.

A feeling that (I will argue) differs very little from rousing from an uncanny dream. Murakami’s novel assimilates the unremarkable conventions of popular culture with eccentricities so absurd that we eventually emerge – as Laura Miller writes – ‘as if from a trance, convinced made contact with something significant, if not entirely sure what that something is’. Kafka exhibits Murakami’s usual amalgam of contemporary Japanese pop culture, metropolitan life, humour and unadorned sexuality while simultaneously breaking new ground into profound self-analysis exploring the ephemerality of human life through his manifestation of what I will refer to as the ‘dreamscape’ – the impalpable subconscious plane on which a great deal of the novel takes place. This enchantingly peculiar bildungsroman begins with the mysterious 15-year-old Kafka fleeing his home in Tokyo to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy, while sequential chapters unravel the meanderings of Nakata, an ageing gentleman afflicted with a bizarre childhood injury and who, remarkably, possesses an ability to talk to cats. Kafka on the Shore narrates the metaphysical ponderings of its eponymous hero, Kafka Tamura, and his apparently incidental cosmic counterpart, Satoru Nakata.

What better time, then, to tackle Haruki Murakami’s great metaphysical and introspective mind-bender, Kafka on the Shore? Elegantly diminishing boundaries between reality and dream, waking-life and the subconscious, Murakami holds his ground as a master of magical realist literature in this novel of 2002.

under lockdown for much of 2020, our newfound abundance of time has inspired new heights of introspection among many.

Johnnie walker kafka on the shore