Self-Alienation and the Fragmented Self in Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore and After Dark: A Psychoanalytic and Existential Reading

Abstract: This paper investigates the theme of self-alienation in Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore and After Dark. Murakami's fiction consistently portrays protagonists who struggle with fractured identities, emotional isolation, and existential uncertainty within postmodern society. While previous scholarship has extensively explored alienation in Norwegian Wood and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, comparatively less attention has been devoted to a comparative study of these two novels through the lens of self-alienation.
Using the theories of Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the study analyzes how Kafka Tamura, Nakata, Mari Asai, and Eri Asai negotiate fragmented identities, loneliness, memory, and interpersonal disconnection. The paper argues that Murakami presents self-alienation not merely as psychological suffering but as a transformative process through which characters reconstruct identity. Ultimately, the novels depict alienation as an unavoidable consequence of modern existence while simultaneously suggesting the possibility of healing through self-awareness and human connection.

Keywords: Self-alienation, identity, existentialism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, Haruki Murakami