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Motif
Explanation and Analysis—Water:
Water is a recurring motif in Kafka on the Shore that appears in metaphor, imagination, and literal description. Water, especially rain, is closely linked to time, with the flow of water representing the passage of time and the fluidity of existence. By making the concept of time tangible, it can be made to symbolically exist within characters, as they feel its presence and influence within them:
Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart.
In this passage, Crow tells Kafka that his heart holds more than it can contain, as he considers how daunting his future is and how strong the influence of his father and his father's prophecy are, encapsulating both the past—his father's past actions—and the future, ordained by the prophecy. The weight of the past and future within Kafka are too much to confront in the present moment.
The thread of water and time occurs throughout the novel:
I get out of bed, go over to the window, and look at the night sky. And think about time that can never be regained. I think of rivers, of tides. Forests and water gushing out. Rain and lightning. Rocks and shadows. All of these are in me.
In this passage, Kafka has just encountered the living ghost of Miss Saeki, someone who exists in between different times. The things that exist "within" Kafka, his own connections to past and future and how helpless he feels in the passage of time, are something that he shares with Miss Saeki, someone else with an abnormal relationship to time.
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