Taking responsibility for our lives and our actions. Flip this around and you could say that where there’s no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. It’s just like Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibilities. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. The story urges us to face our storm or fate, so we can gain a better understanding of who we are and move forward in life freely. But because he was able to come to terms with his abandonment issues, he was freed. If Kafka never confronted his mother, then he would always be a prisoner to his past feelings. Here is where the story of Kafka can influence us. Our life isn’t a plot that will cause us to confront the uncomfortable aspects. Of course, real life is not like a story. The very thing that causes us discomfort is what we need. These storms can involve our career choices, relationships, habits, or ideologies.

Trials for us to complete and mature or to ignore and hide from and remain the same person. We can view them as fate or perhaps challenges and obstacles life has set in front of us. Such storms are always present in our life. He eventually relents to the inevitable and faces his fate/storm in order to grow. He tries to run away from it, to hide from it, but he is constantly driven towards his fate. All his actions lead him towards this fate. Kafka’s fate is to confront his mother, who abandoned him at a young age. That’s what this storm’s all about.įate is at the core of Murakami’s novel. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step.Īnd once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive.

Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. It’s in this exploration of life that we can find valuable lessons. Murakami uses aspects of magical realism in order to explore concepts such as fate and past trauma. The narrative follows two central characters, Kafka and Nakata, as they interact with other humans, cats, spirits, and even figures like Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker. Kafka On The Shore is a novel by Haruki Murakami.

Kafka on the shore