“Chance Encounters Are What Keep Us Going”: Affective Assemblages in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore

This paper examines Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore by employing a triangulated framework of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of assemblage, Critical Posthumanism and Critical Disability Studies.One of the two protagonists of Kafka on the Shore, Nakata, experiences intellectual disability as a result of an accident in his childhood.Ostracized by family, he navigates his life forming multiple liaisons with the human and nonhuman others he encounters by chance.The mutual exchanges of information and shared spaces among the various components of the assemblages transform both the individual parts and the assemblage as a whole.The interactions, in turn, enable much-needed correlative support in sustaining harmonious coexistence.Most importantly, these networks of interdependence and care further create an apt environment for posthuman agency among their parts to evolve and fare better within a world of constant flux.This study explores how the heterogeneous components of the affective assemblages in Murakami's novel interact with each other, co-function and co-become on a Deleuzian plane of difference, symbiosis and immanence.The paper fills the gap in the existing literature on Murakami by introducing the perspective of Nakata's dis/ability as an assemblage of distributed agency and analyzing the novel through the lens of the posthuman connection of care.In doing so, it sheds light on Murakami's quiet politics of human evolution through connectedness.