Kafka on the Shore

I couldn't help but feel that this story was "Lynchian". The premise is mundane, Kafka Tamura is just another kid running away from his family. The deepening of the story involves chance encounters which later become inseparable from a dramatic notion of fate. Tamura is drawn into a vortex, his fate at odds with the rational, modern, mundane sense of reality brings out the surreal. This is something that the story stylistically clarifies: that surrealism is about subverting what we expect from reality. Dreams are based on our experiences but they are uncanny because they do not follow the rules of the waking world. on the Shore also interestingly seems to suggest kinship between surrealism and myth, Murakami places in our mind the idea that myth is dream and dream is myth. Oedipus and Orpheus live in the unconscious, ruling our fates whether or not we realize it. And this notion seems to nicely complement Shinto and Buddhism, blurring the boundaries of east and west, asserting a shared experience. I loved reading this book, my first of Murakami and I doubt it will be my last.

I couldn't help but feel that this story was "Lynchian". The premise is mundane, Kafka Tamura is just another kid running away from his family. The deepening of the story involves chance encounters which later become inseparable from a dramatic notion of fate. Tamura is drawn into a vortex, his fate at odds with the rational, modern, mundane sense of reality brings out the surreal. This is something that the story stylistically clarifies: that surrealism is about subverting what we expect from reality. Dreams are based on our experiences but they are uncanny because they do not follow the rules of the waking world. on the Shore also interestingly seems to suggest kinship between surrealism and myth, Murakami places in our mind the idea that myth is dream and dream is myth. Oedipus and Orpheus live in the unconscious, ruling our fates whether or not we realize it. And this notion seems to nicely complement Shinto and Buddhism, blurring the boundaries of east and west, asserting a shared experience. I loved reading this book, my first of Murakami and I doubt it will be my last.