Toward the Sea of Death

Abstract

In Kafka on the Shore (2002), Haruki Murakami’s masterpiece, major characters die. This essay intends to investigate the reason for those deaths and Murakami’s aim of omitting his creatures with the help of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of death desire. In their point of view, there are two types of death instinct; the model of death which is the cause of a body without organs appearance in the state of zero degrees of intensity, and the experience of death which is the possibility for the body without organs to move on to the next level of intensity by the help of desiring-production. Moving from the model of death to the experience of death is called schizophrenized death which is the state the protagonist of the story, Kafka Tamura, and some other characters like Miss Saeki, Kafka’s mom, have finally touched as an improvement in their mental state and soul.