Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

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A number of places mentioned in the novel, such as Jingu Baseball Stadium, are also of special importance to the author. As he writes about in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, it was while witnessing a home run at the stadium that he first decided he could write a novel. Meiji Jingu Baseball Stadium Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End Of The World is a novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. There. That's the basics of it. By far the most appealing part of the story concerns itself with a technique for extracting dreams from unicorn skulls. Our bemused hero (who also seems to be the last of his species) goes off to the library, where an attractive Given that lost love is one of Murakami's major themes and that Murakami likes to play metafictionally with such allusions (the credits at the end of the Japanese edition of the novel also contain a spurious reference to a book translated into Japanese by one "Makimura Hiraku" -- an anagram of Murakami's name), the removal of the explicit reference to the song is puzzling.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Japanese: 世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド, Sekai no Owari to Hādo-Boirudo Wandārando) is a 1985 novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The story alternates between two narratives, "Hard-Boiled Wonderland" and "The End of the World", and has a strange, dreamlike quality running through both.

The novel contains examples of:

And I Must Scream: What the protagonist and the Professor think living inside one's own mind would be like. Treat, John Whittier (2018). The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature. U of Chicago Press. p.293. shadow seems to have the answer: the narrator is living in a realm of his own invention, and that makes the whole book an exercise in imagery, throwing the burden for its success on the sensitivity and subtlety of the writing.

Murakami's prose is almost literally violet. Although I'm not sure how, its intense evocative and visual content rings of the original Japanese text. I'm not qualified to say that; I've never seen the original text and couldn't read it if I did. I have to trust that Birnbaum was able to capture Murakami's fevered use of language and distill as much of it as possible into the more mechanical, cipherlike English. While not as firmly attached to vision as, say, various forms of Chinese, Japanese nonetheless always invokes a visual response in me. Of course, this could just be because I like anime. Granddaughter: You sometimes get so wrapped up in what you're doing, you don't even think about the trouble you make for others. Remember that ankle-fin experiment? Sorry; I digress. The title describes the story perfectly because one of the linked narratives concerns The End Of The World (and I guarantee that phrase does not mean, here, what you think it means) and the other takes place in a sparse, monochromatic and sharp-edged subset of modern Japan. This latter, by following many of the 'rules' of the Hard-Boiled genre, manages to invoke its inspirations, references and homages almost by what it leaves out rather than what it puts in. The protagonist, whose name we never learn, in this tale inhabits a modern profession, one involving data, espionage, conflict, organizations bent on domination, greed, destructive curiosity, whisky, cigarettes, semi-automatic pistols, codes, codebreaking, surveillance, apartment-trashing toughs, switchblades, credit cards, mysterious superiors, The Professor, The Girl, the Macguffin and the Enemy. Hence, with all these stereotypes out to play, the Wonderland - a Hard-Boiled one, at that.

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The second story, The End of the World, involves a man who arrives in a walled village from which he cannot leave who finds that he has no memory of his life prior to arrival. This man is given a job and begins to settle into and discover the world around him, which feels something like a combination of The Village from The Prisoner and the barren islands of Myst. His shadow pulls at him to attempt escape as he becomes ever more interested in this curious place that he now calls home and the people, and dreams, that inhabit it. Hormone-Addled Teenager: The Granddaughter is attracted to the Narrator. The Narrator rejects her despite being attracted to her as well, out of professionalism and common sense. This is one of those books where (in my opinion), you'll enjoy it more if you don't expect the author’s stew of ideas and imagery to make perfect sense or try to analyze his science and philosophy too much. Yes, there are a few logic holes and not everything in the surface-level plot gets resolved in an obvious way. Rather, this is a novel to read for its oddball characters, the vision of the writing, the strange-but-fitting twists and turns of the story, the humorous juxtaposition of the surreal and the everyday, and the existential questions under its fanciful trappings. If you had only 36 hours to live, what would you do with the time? I found the way Murakami chose to answer this question unexpectedly moving. Even with the end of the world coming, you might still have to do laundry... who ascends in a spacious elevator to a corridor where a plump young woman waits to escort him to a closet, at the bottom of which is a chasm with a river running through it. Down he goes to meet the doddering technocrat

The novel has another promising theme that goes nowhere. The narrator's shadow, taken away from him and kept under guard, decides not to wait around for the end of the world. Mr. Murakami rightly subordinates this theme While many of the author’s works might be considered fantasy, this one is more science fiction. Though, while I continue not to understand why many folks insist on always combining the two genres, this selection clearly has elements of both. There’s everything from unicorns to moving between worlds. How exactly, outside the author’s own “mind,” the latter takes place, I am not sure. Neuro-Vault: The protagonist of Hard-Boiled Wonderland has top secret data hidden inside his subconscious to prevent the anti-government Semiotecs from getting at it. There are comparisons I could make. Flann O'Brien, writing The Third Policeman. That had some similar feelings to it. An animated short I once saw at Spike & Mike's Festival of Animation entitled, simply, "The Village." The aforementioned Number Six and his predicament of stasis. All are recognizable, somewhat, in the second narrative, despite its being quite assuredly its own thing and master. In Tokyo, a secret information war between the Calcutecs (of which the protagonist is a member) and the Semiotics is taking place, as an old scientist with an underground lab is behind a lot more than he first lets on. Furthermore, grotesque creatures known as the INKlings have an underground base beneath important Tokyo government buildings, and it’s suspected that they may be in cahoots with the Semiotics. SENDAGAYA WALKING TOUR Aoyama Itchome Station

The Prose

love, sex, memory, dreams, skulls, unicorns -- is usually prosaic. Why was he allowed to narrate a book? To demonstrate that jejune people are manipulating the gadgets of our time? It may be a valid point, but this isn't Beginning this new year, I decided to be more dedicated than ever to reading worthwhile books and not books just to pass (kill) time. Here, in this Murakami selection, I have failed miserably. For me, too much time is spent in the book with everyday character machinations and not enough time developing the mechanisms for reconciling the two worlds contained in it. Too much license is taken by the author to leave it to the reader’s own imagination. As a result, the books comes off as immature and not the product of a intelligent, well-seasoned writer portrayed in his later works. Badass Bookworm: The Professor is an old man and a brilliant scientist. Despite his age, he still manages to climb an underground mountain with a sprained ankle while fending off horrible underground creatures. His granddaughter also qualifies - she's learned huge amounts from her grandfather and has no trouble dealing with a pair of Semiotec goons.