A message to Korean readers in honor of "Kafka on the Shore"

The Boy Called Crow
Chapters 1 to 23

A coming-of-age story about a fifteen-year-old boy heading to the end of the world.
“There are few writers who make us feel like we’re dreaming like Haruki Murakami.”
—Laura Miller (New York Times columnist)

It is significant that Tamura Kafka, the protagonist of Kafka on the Shore, which Haruki Murakami described as “a work in which I poured everything I had and which I am extremely satisfied with,” is a 15-year-old boy.
This is because a 15-year-old boy symbolizes the pure archetype of a human being who stands at the 'end of childhood' and the 'starting point of adulthood.'
The archetype of human beings can be seen as 'das Selbst', the 'original self', untainted by the world's filth and absurdity, rather than 'das Man' (man of the world) who conforms to the common sense and orbit of the world, as Franz Kafka said.


Born and raised in Nakano Ward, Tokyo, Tamura Kafka left home on his fifteenth birthday.
To escape the prophecy that he would kill his father and have sexual relations with his older sister and mother.
On his journey to Shikoku, a place he had never been before, Kafka meets Sakura, a woman his sister's age who left home with her mother when she was young, and visits the Komura Library he had seen in a magazine.
In the library, there is Oshima with a gentle smile and the elegant and beautiful director Saeki.
The peaceful routine of lying about my age, staying in a hotel, reading books at the library, and working out regularly at the gym came crashing down on the eighth day after leaving home.
Kafka wakes up unconscious and covered in blood, and soon after learns that his father has been murdered.
He suspects that the blood on his clothes that night, when he has no memory of the events before and after, is his father's.
A prophecy, like a curse swirling like a sandstorm, gradually weighs down on the boy.

The novel's protagonist, Tamura Kafka, is a complex character who lives a life that moves between reality and fantasy.
Haruki Murakami, who has written stories with young men in their twenties and thirties as the main characters, portrayed a world that is both bleak and wonderful, as it is, in "Kafka on the Shore" by using a fifteen-year-old boy with undefined values ​​and lifestyle as the narrator.
The protagonist, who chose the Czech word for crow, Kafka, as his new name, has no choice but to live alone, separated from the flock like a crow, but he faces life with a strong body and mind.
The boy called the Crow, who appears in the form of a monologue throughout the novel, is his assistant and another self who lets us hear his inner voice.


The psychoanalytic magic realism, which crosses time and space with a boy and an old man as the central axis, draws the reader into a fantastic adventure.
Haruki Murakami's unique imaginative sentences and detailed inner descriptions add depth to the narrative that unfolds without interruption, with metaphors based on Eastern and Western classics and Greek tragedy.
Kafka, the boy who reaches the end of the world following a prophecy like a curse and moves on to a different stage than before, is Haruki himself and also the readers of the novel.
Anyone who has ever crossed a boundary, big or small, will be completely immersed in the journey of a boy who experiences excruciating growing pains in a dream that touches reality.


Responsibility begins in the midst of dreams and imagination
“A true page-turner and metaphysical hallucinogen.
Haruki Murakami is a painter of negative space.” —John Updike (novelist)

The novel features two characters who travel through Shikoku.
The main characters are Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old boy who ran away from home to escape his father's curse, and Satoru Nakata, a sixty-year-old man who became intellectually disabled in a childhood accident but can talk to cats.
The two, who seem to have no connection on the surface, move from Tokyo to Takamatsu, each driven by an instinctive pull.
Kafka and Nakata reach Saeki through a labyrinthine forest and a passageway leading to a giant bridge over the sea.
Saeki, who runs the Gomura Library, is the person they must inevitably meet and the final destination of this strange journey.
Although they have traveled similar paths but have never actually met, they are connected through dreams, transcending physical distance.


As in Haruki Murakami's previous works, the fantasy and surrealism expressed through dreams play a major role in the development of "Kafka on the Shore."
Dreams are not simply mental phenomena experienced while sleeping.
It is an event that reflects the inner unconscious, and since it is directly connected to the real world, responsibility is also assigned accordingly.
After an accident as a boy, Nakata experiences two weeks of unconsciousness and wakes up feeling like he has lost his "normal" self.
With a shorter shadow than others, he unknowingly kills cat killer Johnny Walker and causes a strange phenomenon in which fish and leeches fall from the sky.
Meanwhile, Kafka hypothesizes that he must have killed his father in Tokyo through a special dream circuit on the day he woke up with blood on his clothes.

It's all a matter of imagination.
Our responsibility begins in our imagination.
Yeats writes about it this way:
In dreams begin the responsibilities.
That's exactly what he said.
Conversely, where there is no imagination, there may not be any responsibility.
(Volume 1, page 273)

Oshima's critique of humans lacking imagination raises questions about what modern people living in an empty society tend to forget but 'can never forget.'
The violence, insensitivity, lack of understanding, and intolerance committed without thought are endlessly repeated in modern society in various forms.
Some people easily forget about life-changing events, while others live their entire lives obsessed with them.
I also dream of an ideal space where I can escape the present.
The novel depicts the loss and violence experienced by individuals in Japan, a country still reeling from the aftermath of World War II.
The fantasy in the work, which makes it difficult to discern clear truths at the boundaries of art, love, and time, ultimately connects to reality.
Can we, by borrowing the power of metaphor, return to the peaceful days before we were wounded?

Nakata and Hoshino found the stone at the entrance and opened the door with difficulty.
Yet, the world before my eyes did not change.
Even if you reach the end of the world, what has already happened cannot be undone.
Still, the reason we can't give up on life is because there are things we can't know until we try them ourselves.
Just as an ordinary stone that seems to be found anywhere is actually the entrance to a secret door, the world may be governed by complex, invisible rules.
It is impossible to fully understand a world that changes every day.
I just live by meeting someone, loving them, and remembering them.
At the end of a hard day, we close our eyes.


“You’d better go to sleep now,” says the boy called Crow.
“When you wake up from sleep, you will find yourself in a new world.”
Eventually you fall asleep.
And when you open your eyes, you find yourself in a new world.

(Volume 2, pp. 496-497)

In an interview conducted after writing “Kafka on the Shore,” Haruki Murakami said, “I want to write a novel that, no matter how many times you read it, you can feel new meaning, fun, and deep meaning every time you read it.”
Just as his passion for the work is evident in the fact that he continued revising it for over six months after the deadline, there are hidden elements in the work that can be easily missed if you don't read it carefully.

This is why you should reread Haruki Murakami's masterpiece in a completely revised edition that has restored the author's intentions, style, and narrative techniques as closely as possible to the original.