Magic Realism: Transversing the Gateway Between the Conscious Desire and the Psychic Conflict in Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore

Among modern literature's most prominent practitioners of magical realism, Haruki Murakami stands head and shoulders above the others. Through the lens of magical realism, he spins tales about everyday people, the difficulties they face become symptoms of a more profound existential crisis. The maze of ever-changing space and time usually contains the answer. The literary style known as “magic realism” presents fantastical or dreamlike happenings that take place in the actual world. The boundary between reality and imagination is fuzzier in magical realism, which in turn produces a dreamlike sequence out of mundane, daily events. Latin American authors like Jose Marti and Ruben Dario popularised the magical realist literary subgenre in the 1950s. The fictional tale of two social outcasts is Kafka on the Shore, written and published in 2002 by Haruki Murakami. Two people, an illiterate man named Nakata and a young runaway named Kafka, have the extraordinary talent of communicating with cats. As it delves into questions of destiny, family, life, and the subconscious, the narrative employs magical realist, fantastical, and metaphysical tropes. A concise summary of the book and an introduction to the main characters make up the first part of this article. The purpose of this paper is to argue that Murakami's Kafka on the Shore is a magic realist novel by analysing its parts and the way it progresses via dreamlike passages that blur the boundary between reality and the dream world.