Kafka On The Shore Essay

HOW DOES HARUKI MURAKAMI USE STYLISTIC FEATURES AND CONVENTIONS TO SHOW THAT PEOPLE BENEFIT FROM FRIENDSHIPS?
Haruki Murakami, author of Kafka on the Shore, successfully depicts the idea that people benefit from forming friendships through the use of plot, character development, and dialogue throughout the novel.
Murakami very effectively demonstrates the way that people benefit from friendships via the careful configuration of the plot. Kafka Tamura, a runaway from home, meets a girl, Sakura, on a bus during his journey. The friendship that is established proves crucial to Kafka’s safety when he wakes up ‘covered in blood’, ‘shaking’ and his ‘memory wiped clean’. The runaway has no guardian to call, and so it is his newfound friend Sakura that he turns to in the early hours of the morning for aid. On the basis of their friendship, she opens her apartment to him, and kindly provides the emotional support that he is so clearly in need of. Murakami ingeniously crafts the plot in such a way, with

One example is shown in Hoshino, a ponytail bearing, aloha shirt wearing truck driver matures and grows throughout the novel, due to his unlikely friendship with Nakata, a ‘not very bright’ elderly man. Through the character Hoshino, Murakami shows that life is more than ‘hot sex’ and girls. Via the bizarre companionship the truck driver finds with Nakata, Hoshino experiences ‘one of the most meaningful times of his life’, realises how ‘pointless’ his previous life had been, and that his ‘ungrateful’ and ‘self-centred’ ways can have no place in his life. It is after his journey with Nakata that he finds a new purpose in life, to close the entrance stone, and to change his ways. Murakami demonstrates through Hoshino’s maturation over the course of the novel that through forming friendships people can grow, learn from each other and find their purpose in