© AesthetixMS 2020. This Open Access article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For citation use the DOI. For commercial re-use, please contact editor@rupkatha.com. Privileging Oddity and Otherness: A Study of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore Rasleena Thakur 1 and Vani Khurana 2 1 Ph.D. Research Scholar, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India.Email: rasleena1103@gmail.com, ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3032-2831 2 Assistant Professor, Centre of Professional Enhancement, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India.Email: vani.khurana@lpu.co.in Abstract The concept of otherness in literature usually comes under the broad purview of postcolonial studies, relating to the subaltern and the displaced. This paper, however, focuses on the concept of the ‘other’ and the ‘odd’ in the light of magical realism and how the characters which are generally side-lined by society on the basis of their sexual preference, mental capability, physical deformity, gender fluidity and age find a clear and distinct voice in these fictions. Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore is taken up for this study. The unique blend of surrealism (the progenitor genre) with magical realism (the offspring mode) in the novel creates an oneiric landscape which is still very much rooted in reality, in present day Japan. The paper concentrates on the trauma of certain characters and how their exclusion from society leads to their subsequent recovery. The paper through a detailed and critical study of the novel’s unusual characters and their non-deterministic status of being typified in traditional categories posits magical realism as an apt literary mode for those who lack a voice and are underrepresented in conventional texts. Here ostracism is not portrayed as pessimistic but as a locus for growth and self-discovery. Keywords: Magical Realism, Murakami, Gender fluidity, Disability, Otherness, Trauma. Introduction In Matthew Carl Strecher’s words, “Murakami's use of magical realism, while closely linked with the quest for identity, is not the least bit involved with the assertion of an identity” (Strecher, 1999, p.269). Haruki Murakami doesn’t attempt to link his brand of magical realism with the ongoing literary theories of post-colonialism, post-modernism and the various post-isms which decorate the literary arena. He does not try to propound simplistic explanations for his work, but rather leaves them open-ended. As his various novels stand testimony, he writes for a global audience with a profusion of cultures and plenitude of viewpoints. Murakami’ s fictions revolve around the central questions of identity and the role of history in shaping a person’s individuality. Susan J. Napier reiterates the uniqueness of Japan’s identity crisis as it was never colonized by Europe and how it remains a unique nation among the non-western nations as it doesn’t share the trauma that the colonized non-western nations faced at the hands of the colonizer (Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 1995). Murakami belongs to the post-war generation who have inherited just the haunting memories of war but have not lived through its hypostatized reality. His fictions teeter on the edges of fantastical imagination and politicised history, never reclaiming a definite Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935) Indexed by Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ, ERIHPLUS Special Conference Issue (Vol. 12, No. 5, 2020. 1-11) from 1st Rupkatha International Open Conference on Recent Advances in Interdisciplinary Humanities (rioc.rupkatha.com) Full Text: http://rupkatha.com/V12/n5/rioc1s6n2.pdf DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s6n2