Kafka On The Shore Essay

In the books Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, the main protagonists start their journeys off in a similar manner; running away from their past lives in hopes of finding a better tomorrow. For Niki Junpei, that tomorrow was finding greater purpose in his life after toiling away his prime years as a teacher. After decades of teaching, he ventures into a forest in hopes of finding a new species in order to leave his mark on the world. As fate would have it, Junpei ends up being drawn into a sand dune by villagers from a nearby village, which he tries to escape while trying to find his a purpose for himself. In Kafka on the Shore, main protagonist Kafka runs away from home at the age of 15 to find the rest of his family and get away from his father and the curse he placed on him. Kafka’s father tells him that he will have intercourse with his mother and sister, causing Kafka to struggle with the Oedipus complex throughout the story. In both stories, the protagonists eventually succumb to fate, regardless of how hard they tried to

He realized that he was bursting with a desire to talk to someone about the water trap.” (Abe, pg. 239) Despite frantically trying for weeks to escape, the moment he was able to obtain one of the key items he would need to escape, he decided it would be in his best interest to remain in the village. Like Kafka, I believe fate influenced Junpei’s mind to stay in the village because his fate was to become a crucial part of that community, which was essentially the goal of his original journey. Both characters seemingly had opportunities to defy the constraints placed on them, but ultimately conceded because it was their fate. Murakami and Abe use their stories to display that a person’s fate is an absolute force will always prevail in the end, as it did in the two