A review by quenchgum
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

5.0

kafka on the shore ended up being a really really great read. it’s surreal as hell—starts off as a rather normal story about a young boy running away and soon there’s all sorts of hallucinations (traveling spirits? parallel universes? altered realites?) dominating the story, the plot operating on both the tangible, normal universe and a fictional, surreal paradise. makes you wonder what’s real, to question the assumption that our reality has to be grounded in everyone else’s. “the world is a metaphor,” says one of the characters in the closing pages, and it’s true. our lives, our thoughts arent grounded solely in the atoms that surround us; they are composed and dominated by what we make of it, the realities that we construct. there’s a space, right at the edge of the earth, which we can take for our consciousness, where this all comes together. it’s a space where you reach self-realization, where you no longer passionately try to stop time and live in your small, static fantasy. but to access it, to reach to the proverbial depth of the forest, you need to give yourself up to it. no reservations. no defenses. just lose it. but once you’re there, boy……