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Poorva Parashar asked this question about Kafka on the Shore:
WHY is this book so loved? I mean, I didn't gain anything out of it. I'm not asking this as an insult. I genuinely want to know what the special thing about this book is.
Henry Fordney I'm trying to get my own sense of what the book is and represents. It's about how people use fantasy to escape difficult parts of their past and reali…moreI'm trying to get my own sense of what the book is and represents. It's about how people use fantasy to escape difficult parts of their past and reality. It's about appreciating contradictions without trying to resolve them. It's about the mystery of youth and old age, one which opens entrances and the other which closes them, and which must be shepherded by the middle-aged, namely Oshima and Hoshino. It's about the pain, but also necessity, of confronting the past, the unknown. Ultimately, the plot is fantastic and unintelligible. But life is also fantastic and unintelligible, so we rely on allegory and emotion to make sense of it. In fact, it is precisely this unintelligibility which requires us to interpret the events and motifs of the book symbolically. (less)
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Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
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