She thinks it was “on its way to bomb some large city somewhere, or maybe on its way back from a raid” (Murakami 14). In the interview with Nakata’s school teacher, she speculates about the purpose of a military plane’s flight overhead in the moments before the children’s collapse. Nakata, one of the protagonists in Kafka on the Shore, grows up with the violence of World War II, as is clear in the papers surrounding Nakata’s period of unconsciousness. One such pattern, and its accompanying explanation, is the use of dissociation by characters like Nakata, Kafka Tamura, and Miss Saeki, in order to escape from the violence of their realities, and the use of a separate otherworldly physical space as a refuge Knowledge in other areas of interests, like psychology, explains these patterns. Murakami must have a process and purpose behind what he writes. Despite the author’s own embedded warning, readers are compelled to rise to the challenge, creating a meaning from the book by noticing patterns in the narrative. Haruki Murakami, in his novel Kafka on the Shore, writes a character who decides “Better not to try to make sense…of what basically doesn’t make any” (344). They lack conclusionary details and the most bizarre occurrences are often left “up in the air.” Even in the novels themselves, readers are sometimes advised against trying to make too much out of the stories they tell. Postmodernist novels famously defy convention and resist unifying theories or ideologies. I also enjoy Bailey’s referencing of the Japanese literary tradition of “living spirits” to probe the elusive meaning of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

It is a rich and compelling reading of a fascinating novel. In her essay, Bailey brings together Japanese history during World War II, the psychological condition known as dissociation, and the characters’ response to traumatic violence in their lives.

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