Stranger on Earth

While residing in the library, Kafka sees the “ghost” of a young Miss Saeki in his room one night, and falls madly in love with her. His descriptions of the phenomenon are full of hyperbolic contradictions: Her features are gorgeous, but it’s not only that. She’s so perfect I know she can’t be real. She’s like a person who stepped right out of a dream. The purity of her beauty gives me a feeling close to sadness – a very natural feeling, though one that only something extraordinary could induce (235). After witnessing the ghostly manifestation, Kafka says his head is “too full of that enigmatic girl,” and that “a strange, terrific force unlike anything [he’s] ever experienced is sprouting in [his] heart, taking root there, growing” (236). This is a clear sign that the image of Miss Saeki has already found a way into his young heart. A remarkable coincidence in the form of a popular song sung by Miss Saeki entitled Kafka on the Shore and a painting of a young man by the sea, ...

With Kafka on the Shore ( 海辺のカフカ , 2003), Murakami delivers what is arguably his most crowd-pleasing work. It has all the ingredients that make up a great thriller; it has a sympathetic teenage anti-hero who is at odds with the world; it has an engrossing parallel plot that never loses steam; it proffers more than enough head-scratching, eyebrow-raising mysteries any Murakami fan could wish for. To top it all off, it is also a deeply philosophical work that tackles complex subjects such as identity and Fate. The novel’s intriguing title naturally calls to mind the Czech writer Franz Kafka, author of The Trial and the short story Metamorphosis , immortal symbol of twentieth-century Existentialist angst. When the novel opens, it is instantly clear to the reader that Kafka, a boy who has just turned fifteen, is a troubled soul. He has an internal voice called “the boy named Crow” (“Kafka,” incidentally, means “crow” in Czech) that he converses with, and he quickly comes to the ...