Murakami Haruki’s Obsession For Cat In Kafka On The Shore

Murayama Haruki (1949-) is a high-profile writer in contemporary literary circles. From his debut hear the wind sing, his works conquered the contemporary Japanese readers with its unique charm. Murakami likes using animal image description as his loved writer Franz Kafka. These colorful animal images constitute the unique metaphor world and arouse human to think of the problems. Cat is a very distinct image that plays a dominant role in the novel, hosts and affects other images in the novel. The meaning of the whole work is fully conveyed through the cat.This paper focuses on summarizing the cat image, trying to find out the aesthetic value and cultural psychology of the cat from the angle of combining history and reality through the analysis, reading, research of Murayama Haruki’s some representative works. Besides introduction and conclusion, the paper has two chapters. The logic is as follows:the introduction part briefly introduced the present situation, main contents, research ideas and research methods of this topic.Chapter1,by summarizing animal image in literature works, analyzing the root of animal image in Murakami’s novel, which can help us understand his animal image and his violence meaning. Chapter2,the analogy between killing People and eat, human’s violence to animal, we can find the deep core of violence, the history memory, the loss of self, identity and the right to live in Murakami’s novel. Chapter3concludes this thesis. Cats in Murakami’s works are not good is not evil, but good and evil are intertwined convertible. In other words, the cat is both to the victims of violence, and the violence. Changing Cat and the lack of "father", are both metaphor of human self-loss. The cat shuttles between the reality and non-reality world, ingenious space conversion. It symbolizes the self-loss in the real world. Cat image is a negative resistance to human existence.