AbstractThis research focuses on Haruki Murakami's fantasy novel, Kafka on the Shore, which tells the adventurous and metaphysical journey of a fifteen-year-old boy Kafka Tamura who leaves his home and his father remained behind in search of his own identity, which was undone when his mother and sister abandoned him in early childhood. Another of the novel's key protagonists, Nakata, is a strange character with a memory lapse and a bizarre ability to talk to cats. This exemplary and perhaps experimental narrative takes us through the two unique and strange characters through two parallel plot paths that ultimately collide and gracefully conclude the journey of both. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay This project explores Murakam's style of magical realism, characterized by the fusion of temporal boundaries and dreams against reality, in the context of Kafka and Nakata's search for individual identity amidst the consumerist crowd characterized by the imprints of a rich folklore and culture. But at the moment, it is mixed with the hustle and bustle of contemporary urban life, imposing its own dimensions of identity loss. This article analyzes the elements of magical realism and Lacanian surrealism employed in the text, in connection with the fundamental theories of identity crisis and the Oedipus complex in the context of consumer society. The article further explores the areas of identity formation, with respect to the two main protagonists mentioned above and describes what turn of events ultimately led them to rediscover their identity before returning to the real world they initially left behind. Introduction The term "magical realism" has been thrown around rather liberally of late, especially since the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Many contemporary scholars refused to use the term mainly because it was not well defined. Scholarly articles and collections such as Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995) and Magic realism: Social Context and Discourse (1995) have successfully created the foundation for the next generation by establishing a broad reference. Magical realism, despite being widely used in contemporary international literature, was believed to have its roots in Latin America which falsified one of its fundamental principles and claimed that it had a rather universal scope. To define the concept, magical realism is a piece of literature or art form characterized by the inclusion of practical or mythical elements in a seemingly realistic fiction. Matthew Strecher defines magical realism as "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe." As Rogers proposes, there are three main elements (or effects) characterized in magical realism that convey the different worldview and those effects refer to the ways in which this worldview is different from the “objective” view. In a text describing magical realism: time is not linear, causality is subjective, and the magical and the ordinary are the same thing. Some other perspectives on this style focus more on the readers and their surroundings. As editors LP Zamora & W. B Faris write: “Magical realism often facilitates the fusion, or coexistence, of possible worlds, spaces, systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes of narrative” (Lois Parkinson Zamora 5), ​​​​the fundamental principle This technique involves the assimilation of temporal differences, ambiguous boundaries between reality and dreams and the magical apparitions ofstrange characters and events, which are abundantly present in Kafka on the Shore. In one of the essays presented in the cited source, “reader textualization”, a process, according to Jon Thiem, whereby the boundaries between the world of the readers and that of the characters are magically erased”. Most of the prominent writers of this genre have set their visionary tales in third world places where myth and folklore loom over the cultural landscape (Gioia np). In these stories, magical realism somehow merges with the literary landscape as its natural extension, and then dissolves. One of the first clear pieces of evidence observed in The Kingdom of This World is Carpentier's use of the literary form known as magical realism, which was actually a form adapted from the European artistic aesthetic of Franz Roh (Lois Parkinson Zamora 19). In the prologue to his The Kingdom of this World, Alejo Carpentier says: '[The] Marvelous... does not depend on the idea that the marvelous is admirable because it is beautiful. Ugliness, deformity, everything terrible can be wonderful. Everything strange is wonderful. Well, I'm talking about the marvelous reality when I refer to certain things that have happened." This indicates that the coining and origin of this style is not the exclusive work of Carpentier, but also of numerous of his contemporaries such as Gabriel Garcia Márquez. In Carpentier's work, we witness the juxtaposition of magical realism with Roh's literary rendering of magical realism, where he refers to it as "lo maravilloso real", meaning "the marvelous real". Surrealism began in 20th century France, when the few literary figures experimentally proposed the idea of ​​constructing reality from dreams. This notion is heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, where meaning is observed to exist beyond what is real, more in the unconscious dimensions of reality. It is also considered an avant-garde movement in art and literature that expected to unleash the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example through the irrational juxtaposition of images. Intending to liberate human thought, language, and experience from the oppressive confines of rationalism, surrealism took its lead from (Mann np). Founded by the poet André Breton in Paris in 1924, surrealism was intended to be a revolutionary movement capable of freeing the minds of the masses from the rational order of society. In this sense, the surrealist movement rhymes closely with magical realism in which rational boundaries dissolve rather imperceptibly. In the construction of identity, the notion of self and self-awareness play a fundamental role. According to Jacques Lacan, the child initially perceives himself as a partial organism, unified with his mother. This consciousness is altered in the mirror stage when the infant sees his reflection in the mother's eyes and recognizes himself as a whole being separate from her. Lacan suggested in his famous theory of the “Mirror Stage” (stade du miroir) that the structure of the ego itself was constituted through a disjointed montage composed of the child's identifications with seductive and threatening mirror images of the totality that reflected but contrasted sharply with his fragmented and uncoordinated body. It is therefore useful to think of Lacanian psychoanalysis as assertive with respect to many of the goals of surrealism. Affirming the lived realities of drives, Lacan asserts that life is lived through the structures and logics of montage. In other words, from a Lacanian perspective, reality is intrinsically surreal. Since psychological realism is a branch of realism that deals with deeply interconnected real-life experiences in the chamber of human consciousness, theSurrealism goes much further, and therefore sinks into the pool of the unconscious and the subconscious, expanding the hidden human territory. The Surrealists were particularly interested in the study and effects of dreams and hallucinations, as well as the interpretation of sleeping and working conditions at the threshold of consciousness. This phenomenon is beautifully employed in Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. Published in 2002, Kafka on the Shore, written by novelist Haruki Murakami, revolves around the story of Greek looking at destiny and prophecy. Murakami primarily uses the techniques of magical realism to assert the importance of individual identity in the social flow of modern civilization. In doing so, it explores different dimensions of identity that arose and are cultivated in modern Japan, especially in the aftermath of World War II. The novel, divided into forty-nine chapters, unfolds through two parallel plots that originate in two different times and spaces that coincide beautifully towards the end. The odd-numbered chapters are narrated in the first person and tell the story of a fifteen-year-old boy named Kafka, who runs away from his hometown to avoid the Oedipal prophecy given by his father Koichi Tamura, a famous sculptor. Delivering the prophecy, the father says that Kafka would sleep with his mother and sister. Kafka himself seems to be a determined boy with a special character, solitary and ready to be liberated by society except with his companion Corvo, who is nothing other than his imaginary friend or alter ego, who advises him to become the hardest man . in the world. In a seemingly impossible mission, Kafka, the self-proclaimed toughest fifteen-year-old, decides to leave everything behind to search for his mother and sister, whom he remembers well but had no idea where they were. In a spontaneous move, he travels to a city called Takamatsu and meets a young girl, Sakura, who he thinks is his sister. With a deep interest in reading and books, he ends up living in a library with the help of a twenty-two-year-old gay librarian, Oshima. In the library Kafka also meets Miss Saeki, the owner of the place, who lost her lover at the age of fifteen. Kafka assumes and believes that it could be his mother. Under mysterious circumstances, his father is murdered in his hometown, triggering a series of search operations against him. He then moves to a remote cottage owned by Oshima where he explores the timeless jungle encountering strange lost soldiers from the time of World War II. Even the chapters numbered and narrated in third-person style tell the story of Satoru Nakata, a boy injured in a mysterious accident during the Second World War. The accident appears to have serious repercussions on Nakata's health and well-being. He suffered a mental deficit and also had strange characteristics where he is shown to be able to talk to cats but, strangely, is unable to read or write. Nakata is introduced in the novel after fifty years earning his living as a cat catcher. Through mysterious channels, he is shown to interact with Kafka and even kill Kafka's father who kidnaps cats, cuts off their heads, and takes their souls to create his divine Flute. Once involved in this unusual twist, Nakata realizes he has a mission to accomplish, a mission that requires exploration and long journeys to a place he has no idea about. This mission randomly takes him to Takamatsu with the help of a Hoshino highway truck driver. They work together to locate a mysterious object called the Gateway Stone that transcends them all into a new world. In the end, Kafka frees himself from the prophecy and returns home to resume his life, albeit as a rejuvenated young man.In addition to the magical realism elements (which we will talk about in more detail later), realist elements are also used. the novel, although not in detail. A mysterious event related to the appearance of a metallic body in the sky during the time of the World War is presented in the Nakata timeline where young children are hiking in the jungle in search of edible mushrooms. The appearance of the strange object causes sixteen students, including Nakata, to fall into a coma. The wartime report says: 'The following document, classified Top Secret by the United States Department of Defense, was made public in 1986 through the Freedom of Information Act. The document is now held at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. DC, and you can access it there.' Murakami plays carefully as he details these situations, and since no names or cities are realistically mentioned, only a vague and frightening description of the war-engulfed scene is portrayed. The scene is well explained through the words of Nakata's teacher when the study of mushrooms becomes a valuable lesson to teach children: “Thus the children were encouraged to look for food wherever they could find it. After all, the country was at war and food took priority over studying.” While the novelist describes the scene of war, starvation, homelessness, depravity and starvation, it is also indicated that Japan at the time was in a unique position to escape from the colonizers of Korea, China and other countries, advancing insistently in the shadow of American supremacy. Meanwhile, Japan has persisted vigorously, without giving up, and used all its power to transcend itself into the new era of industrialization, while preserving its heritage and culture. In the midst of this transformation from a historic cultural center to an industrialized center of power, Kafka's story paints a portrait of contemporary society and his personality that is nothing more than a surreal dream. The society that was pushed by effort into a new era as it struggled and rediscovered itself in various forms, inhibits the long-rooted tradition of resilience and strength that is magically reflected in the characters and context of Kafka on the shore. the Riva, at least half of it, is guided through the Oedipus complex and is often expressed in the form of dreams. The dream was used as a tool to represent the imaginary world which at times merges seamlessly and surrealistically with the realistic world throughout the novel. Since the protagonist suffers from temporal memory loss, probably due to the traumatic experience faced previously, Murakami exploits this situation to inject dreamlike and magical sequences that take place in dreams and imagination rather than in factual history or real events. On the other hand, it is rather dreams that have an influence on real life. This creates a beautiful juxtaposition in which dreams help plot and build the plot of the novel and thus makes it possible for totally independent characters in different timelines to magically converse with each other. This magical connection, with the use of magical realism constructs, clarifies how the story unfolds through dreams rather than planned actions. As Burroughs writes, magical thinking is “a schizotypal personality disorder that attributes to one's actions something that has nothing to do with him or her and therefore assumes that one has a greater influence on events than is actually the case.” (Burroughs XV), this aspect of magical thinking seems to be well used by Murakami throughout the novel. Along with magical elements, surreal elements are illustrated in dreams,.