Identity crisis and quest for meaning in Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore and Mine Söğüt's Mr. Madam Arthur and Everything in Their Life

The sensitivity to social problems, the identity crisis experienced, the expression of imposed social rules, and the way people fall into a depression have found their reflections in the literature in two works, Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore and Mine Söğüt's Mr. Madam Arthur and Everything in Their Life, selected from Turkish and Japanese literature of the twenty-first century. Regardless of East and West, the capitalist society drags people into chaos, the discontent and uncertainty created by chaos and the disidentification brought by this uncertainty in all societies. Therefore, in this study, it is aimed to make a comparison between how the postmodern society is criticized and reflected in the mentioned works and how successful the novel characters are in their individual struggles at the end of the two novels. The study is limited to examining the identity problem in Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore and Mine Söğüt's Mr. Madam Arthur and Everything in Their Life. The main purpose of the study is to trace how the authors deal with the common subject in their works that are the subject of the study. In this context, the pluralist analysis method was used as a method due to the use of different disciplines, and the works in question are to be examined by putting sociological and psychoanalytic criticism theories in the center. From a philosophical and sociological point of view, answers have been sought to the questions of what alienation in postmodern society is, how it occurs and what are the reasons why individuals are dragged into depression. In the conclusion part, a general evaluation was made on the comparison of the works by emphasizing the common, similar and different points determined in the context of the subject of the study. Keywords: Haruki Murakami, Mine Söğüt, Postmodern, Alienation, Identity Crisis