Diving into the Enigma: The Magic Realism of Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore”

Abstract

In literature, magic realism presents real-world occurrences that combine elements of fantasy, magic, and dreams. Magic realism makes it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction and infuses regular events and ordinary life with a dreamlike quality. Most frequently, the term “magic realism” refers to the literary subgenre made popular by Latin American authors like Ruben Dario and Jose Marti in the 1950s. Japanese author Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949, during Japan’s post-World War II era. His writings are influenced by many different cultures and traditions and frequently contain magic and fantasy. In his paintings, allusions to both Western society and Japanese tradition collide. Hear the Wind Sing was the title of his debut manuscript. In Kafka on the Shore, a fifteen-year-old boy named Kafka narrates his journey in the first person as he flees his family’s curse and his father, believing that his life is condemned, but memories and dreams follow him. The book also narrates the tale of an elderly man named Satoru Nakata, who becomes able to communicate with cats despite losing his ability to read and write. Their lives are lived in parallel, and their worlds collide with one another. Portals to different worlds open up, and mysterious events start to take place. Through the use of a mystical stone known as the “entrance stone,” the lives of these two individuals merge at the end of the narrative. Time, space, and reality are all blurred in Kafka on the Shore, a literary maze full of magic, fantasies, unsettling coincidences, and mind-bending images. The main objective of the article is to present Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore as a work of magic realism by analysing the features of magic realism that are employed in the book and how the plot develops with dream-like instances that blur the boundaries between reality and the world of dreams.