[image source: oneirio(DeviantArt)]

For the first time in my life, I have read something that is superimposed with reality and elusive fantasy. From self-existential crisis to trying to know what life is beyond imagination and how we are weighted down by mere virtues (of time and memories - and our goals). There’s something in Murakami’s writing that vividly expresses the characters that fit for a 23-year old guy to, perhaps, a 50-year-old me in the future (if I read this book again after ages in the future).

I had (at the time of writing this blog) been reading this book for a while. I think it took me arond a month to complete it. Most of the time, I read this book in micro bus while travelling here and there. Sometimes, I was so much engulfed in the elusive world of talking cats, raining fishes, running away from home at an early age, having sex, living in the library, living alone in the woods,…err that I used to forget what reality actually was and used to miss my destination while on the bus. This is the first book that has pumped up my thirst for “wanting” to read more chapters. If food and time weren’t to take in action, I think I would have actually get lost in this surreal world that Murakami tries to draw - that thin line between fantasy and reality.

“Kafka on the shore” surely fits into one of those “reads” that resonates with my thought processes about life - trying to live, trying to do something, and above all accepting the life as it is. This book surely tries to aggregate the world of knowns (reality) and the unknowns (perhaps spiritual part, but I like to call it “living in one’s inner dream” [or you can call it soul if you can like to]).

At the end of the book, you are left with this equally empty and fulfilled thoughts, that things have turned out as it ought to have like our lives taking us somewhere we will feel alive and changed, all weighed down by time and memories of ourselves, of someone else and something.

I am a big fan of Franz Kafka that when I bought this book 5 months back I had thought it to be something about Franz Kafka. But now realize that the word Kafka is merely a (my version) manifestation of trying to get hold of reality, striking back at it, trying to learn, trying to live. Turns out, The Boy Named Crow is me. But I am noone. I am a paradox in myself. It has been more than a year that I have lost what I was in the past. Maturity is when you realize you have to do something with your life, not the other way around because otherwise life will do something about you itself and there will be no turning back and all you will have regrets.

Coming back to the book itself, I think in some ways I have found myself being the manifestation of Kafka Tamura or that this 15-year-old boy has projected himself into my mind’s inner dimension. Or perhaps, I am Nakata trying to get to my real self.

Anyways, I have certainly realized that Murakami is a genius.

Cheers…