Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

More often than not, we expect a book to have its own meaning and lesson. It’s only natural to think this way because most books offer advice, or rather we draw a collection of wise sayings from the book. But you can’t always enter a book with such expectations.

All you can do is stand right where the sand meets the sea and let the waves pull you in.

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Kafka on The Shore had a similar effect on me. I imagined myself tracing an invisible path along the shore as if I’ve done that already. I revisited a place that I had never been to and yet that place felt like home.

The main character, Kafka Tamura – even though it isn’t his real first name – has deep and meaningful conversations about metaphors. How wind has no form. How tragedy is powerful. And how humans run in circles from life to death and disappear. We are nothing but a movement of the world in the form of shadows.

But what it all boils down to is this

“How dark and deep is your shadow?"

The book is, by and in itself, a metaphor. It clings to no logic, reason, or gumption. It has its own rhythm and its own soul. And if you’re lucky enough to be afflicted by it, even in the most infinitesimal manner, it stays with you forever.

All you do is sit on its spine and let the story carry you closer and closer to the horizon where there’s nothing to do but observe the barren sky, the slithering clouds, and the sun that quietly dips into the water letting out a soundless sigh.