In his novel Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami uses elements of surrealism to interweave dreams and reality. Kafka Tamaru, the eponymous hero, encounters moments where he realizes the intersection of reality and the dream world, but cannot remember whether what is happening is his own experience or that of another. Because Kafka's mother and sister left him with his father when he was a child, he has little or no memory of them – his only memory of them is on a beach, near the 'water, where they spent their vacations a long time ago. His mother and sister are faceless figures as if they never existed and as if they were part of a dream. Satoru Nakata, an elderly man involved in the 1944 Rice Bowl Hill Incident that left him illiterate, also experiences instances where he cannot confirm reality in several bizarre contexts. Mentally disabled Nakata and his middle-aged companion, Hoshino, travel from their home in the Nakano district to Shikoku, where Nakata believes he is destined to be. As the title indicates, the shore is an integral part of this story: it is a blurred border that moves, but which connects two distinct elements. Kafka and Nakata's drifts between dreams and reality render them unable to distinguish their true memories from those of their dreams, thus illustrating Murakami's idea that dreams and reality constantly interact with each other on the shore. Murakami uses the easily penetrated veil that separates the dream. separate the world from reality, the shore, to improve Kafka's relationship with Mrs. Saeki. Mrs. Saeki, a woman in her forties, is the owner of the library in which Kafka stays for the duration of his escape from home. Kafka is attracted to Mrs. Saeki in her teenage ghost form, who is middle of paper... two soldiers from the past who guide him to the dream world and back. When Kafka returns to his cabin, he thinks about the painting in his room in the library. “The waves crash gently against the shore. They rise, fall and break. Rise, fall and break. And my consciousness is sucked into a dark, gloomy corridor” (455). The waves are the world of dreams and the sand is reality. No matter how often the wave, or the dream world, meets the shore, it will never succeed in drowning reality with it: before reaching the shore, the wave breaks and retracts, like an endless cycle . Murakami compares the shore to aspects of real life: “In the distance, a crow cries. The Earth continues to slowly rotate. But beyond these details of reality, there is the dream. And everyone lives there” (300). He says that under every mask there are dreams that people live.