Haruki Murakami on his all-time favorite book: "I was deeply impacted by the world it described."

Murakami's heart is split in two . The Japanese writer admitted as much when recalling the moment, at just 15 years old, when he read Franz Kafka's The Castle . That literary encounter marked a turning point in his life. "It shocked me tremendously," he explained. "The world Kafka described in that book was so real and so unreal at the same time that my heart and soul seemed torn in two."

Although Murakami seamlessly blends the everyday with the dreamlike, jazz with whiskey, loneliness with cats, his literary universe is best understood by tracing that initial trail. His affinity with Kafka was so intense that years later, he would pay homage to him with a novel that bears his name in the title, Kafka on the Shore .

Franz Kafka's "The Castle" was the book that changed everything. Unfinished and published posthumously, this work follows K., a land surveyor trapped in a village where he tries unsuccessfully to contact the inhabitants of a mysterious castle. The story is both absurd and harrowing, like a dream where the rules change without warning.

It's not the only work that has left its mark on him. In past interviews, the author of Tokyo Blues has also highlighted other titles such as The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald—a book he considers "the reason I write"—or The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, whose novels he has translated into Japanese. However, when forced to choose just one, he returns without hesitation to Kafka: "It was an incredibly great book."

The connection with Kafka goes beyond admiration. Murakami found a mirror in her. Like K., many of his characters confront invisible structures, abstract forces, and impossible tasks. His literature doesn't so much respond to closed plots as to rarefied atmospheres where anything can happen, but nothing is ever entirely clear.

Murakami found in Kafka an echo of his own inner world. Therefore, when he speaks of The Castle , he does so with a mixture of gratitude and melancholy.

Murakami's heart is split in two . The Japanese writer admitted as much when recalling the moment, at just 15 years old, when he read Franz Kafka's The Castle . That literary encounter marked a turning point in his life. "It shocked me tremendously," he explained. "The world Kafka described in that book was so real and so unreal at the same time that my heart and soul seemed torn in two."