Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World is one of Murakami’s most surrealistic and experimental novels. It’s perhaps the only one that could be categorized as true ‘science fiction.’ Only half of the book takes place in the ‘real’ world, with each alternating chapter taking us to the walled town located deep within the protagonist’s subconscious. The other narrative, about The End of the World, is much harder to pin down. I could barrage you again with references, but those would do you much less good; there is no existant genre to invoke in your forebrain which would serve. At least, none I feel comfortable bringing across without spoiling... something. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" would have been better if Mr. Murakami had been able to get more emotion into his story. This futuristic tale begins intriguingly enough, with a garrulous young man Bittersweet Ending: The End of the World plot, leading to a Downer Ending for the Hard-Boiled Wonderland plot.

were mere tics and as if the book's gathering theme -- the end of the world, no less -- were best left for serious treatment to the likes of Nevil Shute (whose "On the Beach" at least has passion). 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. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End Of The World is a novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. There. That's the basics of it. much help, since it misuses words like "transpire,""furthest" and "shined"; it is also full of redundancies that may or may not have come from the Japanese. Identity Amnesia: The narrator of The End of the World can't remember anything about himself before coming to the town.

The Prose

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.

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.The first narrative ("Hard-Boiled Wonderland") tells the story of an unnamed protagonist in a Cyberpunk future Tokyo who is trained to be what is essentially a human data processor, whose subconscious holds an encryption key to prevent the information from falling into the wrong hands. The second narrative ("The End of the World") follows an individual who has just arrived in a strange walled town where the inhabitants, including the narrator, have been separated from their shadows and are not allowed to go beyond the town wall. The two parallel narratives begin to bleed through into one another as the novel reaches its conclusion, exploring themes of identity and consciousness. 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.

Combines a witty sci-fi pastiche and a dream-like Utopian fantasy in two separate narratives which alternate in an interweave of precognition and deja vu Richard Lloyd Parry, IndependentA 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 Big Beautiful Woman: According to the narrator, the Granddaughter is pudgy in a very attractive way. The first story, Hard Boiled Wonderland, is a sort of detective story set in a technomagically realistic Tokyo somewhere in the vicinity of the present. This story follows a man working for The System: a pseudogovernmental organization dedicated to the keeping of certain information secret. This man is, essentially, a human encryption device. Simply put, he encodes data using the structure of his brain as a sortof encoding key. This character gets assigned to a particularly interesting encryption job where he must use special advanced (and prohibited) techniques which make use of his subconscious mind. This job, however, embroils him in a strange world of intrigue on levels he never imagined both figuratively and literally. Alas, the end of the world dwindles fast into a sophomoric funk suffered by a narrator whose prose style cannot be better than it is because -- get this -- he's not a writer. What an unfortunate bind to get into -- one

Empty Shell: The citizens of the town at the End of the World are basically this, and it is implied that the narrator will become like this once his shadow dies and he is fully assimilated into the town. In both narratives, none of the characters are named. Each is instead referred to by occupation or a general description, such as "the Librarian" or "the Big Guy."Murakami's books are often categorized in "Sci-Fi/Fantasy", but I believe that is mis-labeling. I have read (well, listened to) "Kafka on the shore", "1Q84", "Wind-up bird chronicle", and "Dance, Dance, Dance", and they are not SF, in my opinion - they have core elements other than SF. 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... nticed by news of Haruki Murakami's Japanese literary prizes and by translations of stories appearing in American magazines,