Responsible Dreaming: Dreamscapes and Trauma Response in Murakami Haruki’s Kafka on the Shore

Abstract

In much of Murakami Haruki’s fiction, landscapes
become dreamscapes, sites of contestation, and arenas where
characters challenge individual, regional, and national identity
on multiple levels. In Kafka no umibe (Kafka on the Shore, 2002,
2005) the novel’s dual protagonists (both of whom have
experienced life-changing trauma) move through psychic
dreamscapes physically mapped onto the topography of Japan as
they independently pursue quests of enlightenment. By retracing
the steps of things forgotten—or never consciously known—
Kafka and Tamura activate the possibility of creating a new
engagement with their respective foundational traumas and the
consequences.