Kafka on the Shore Literary Elements

Fiction; fantasy

The novel is set in the Japanese cities of Tokyo and Takamatsu in the early 2000s.

The book is narrated in alternate chapters by Kafka Tamura (in the first-person) and by an unnamed third-person omniscient narrator. The point of view shifts between Kafka and the secondary characters of Nakata and Hoshino.

The tone is casual and at times joking; the mood is ominous and surreal.

Kafka Tamura is the protagonist; his primary antagonist is his father, Koichi.

The major conflict in the novel is that Kafka Tamura is trying to escape the Oedipal curse his father put on him when he declared that Kafka was fated to kill his father, and sleep with his mother and sister.

The novel reaches its climax when Kafka goes deep into the forest and briefly lives in the limbo village; there he is able to forgive his mother for abandoning him by forgiving the limbo version of Miss Saeki.

Hoshino and Nakata arriving at the Komura Memorial Library foreshadows the inevitable convergence of the novel's two plot lines.

The novel makes repeated allusions to the Greek mythological figure of Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother.