When I awoke one recent morning in Prague from unsettling dreams, I found myself changed into a tourist on a mission. Changed, anyway, from the traveler I had been when I lived in Prague for three years in the 1990s.

Back then, whatever associations I had between the city and the writer Franz Kafka, a native son, were negative. I loathed the commercialization of Kafka, his face scrawled across coffee mugs and T-shirts in souvenir shops, his name emblazoned on awnings of Old Town cafes and restaurants.

Yet there was always something nagging at me about never having explored the Kafka trail in Prague, an integral part of the city’s cultural history. On top of that, Kafka’s novella “The Metamorphosis,” in which the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, finds himself transformed into a bug, was first published in book form this month a century ago.

And so, I thought, what better time to finally explore the writer and the city with which he is inextricably intertwined. In doing so I’d talk to a fairly diverse group of people about how this city may have influenced one of his most famous works — and how it may have shaped the famously tortured writer himself.