Hardboiled Wonderland And The End of the World
Haruki Murakami’s book Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World is about a man who is an unwilling participant in a war between two omnipotent information agencies. It moves with the pace of a crime novel but concerns itself with the exploration of the human mind, consciousness and mortality. It’s written using split narratives that gradually converge as you move through the story to a climax that will leave your synapses smoking.
The plot of the story and its unnamed main character -- an emotionally detached but intensely humane number analyst living alone with his albums and whiskey collection in an anonymous Tokyo apartment -- serve as a frame around explorations into the nature of the subconscious and the mind’s ‘core self’.
The man is also reflected in the second narrative. He experiences a parallel reality, set in a peaceful town around which a high wall has been built. None of the town’s residents knows how they got there or why, nor have any memory of a past existence, except that each was separated from their shadow before being allowed to enter the prison from which nobody desires to escape.
While you can guess both characters are the same person, and the journey that take place in this fantastic, vaguely unsettling limbo land are allegory for the events in the first narrative thread, it’s purpose is never spelled out and remains tantalizingly out of reach even after you’ve read the last page of the book and rolled it around in your mind like a malt whiskey.
The book’s aftertaste is a strange disembodied yearning I haven’t felt since reading Franz Kafka. As its title suggests, Hardboiled Wonderland has the pace and tension of suspense novel as the characters in both narratives strive to discover why they have been chosen to have their minds torn from them. Murakami’s has an ability to draw such rich detail and life from the mundane, laying them bare like a frog being dissected on a silver stainless tray.
Yet the book has more substance than pulp fiction. It seeks to question the links between conscious and sub-conscious, memory and time, and the possibilities which could open should science find a way to unlock the brain’s mystery. Which, in the book, it does its best to when a scientist discovers how to use left and right brain independently, wiring in a circuit to access both the concious and subconcious minds -- until things go wrong.
Despite dealing with such weighty material, the story propels you foward. Murakami’s main character is believable – even likeable -- and he weaves in plenty of bleak, understated humour to surprise and delight you. Every chapter he throws out more questions, but the pace of the prose leaves you to ponder them like you might an intriguing stranger standing on a platform as your train draws away.
His descriptions are simple, unpretentious and sometimes beautiful. Occasionally, they’ll stop your eyes in their tracks. He is not a wordy, flowery writer but an economical and plain one, choosing each word.
But Murakami is far from perfect -- some dialogue is too wooden and clichéd to be realistic, and it jars; the plot sometimes too convenient, and the jump-cut editing can be a frustration. His shortcomings in manipulating devices designed to carry the jewel of the story is not enough to tarnish it. Dialogue is also very difficult to translate naturally, and for the most part it rings true.
To attempt a work of this nature is extremely ambitious, but Murakami has succeeded. I was rationing pages, savouring each paragraph on the train and sometimes even wishing there were a few more stops to go on the line so I could keep reading.
As for uncovering a message, a kernel of knowledge to keep after the book’s been returned to the shelf? I still haven’t been able to decide what this book means. It's the sort of imaginative, surreal work that a trite message would undermine. The ending is open for the reader to interpret as best he or she can.
Or maybe I’m just not smart enough to grasp Murakami's intention and articulate it. Perhaps that’s the whole point of Hardboiled Wonderland – questioning and considering become the journey, made more significant, in the end, than the destination itself.
Haruki Murakami is a very popular author in Japan and around the world. He has written many novels, the most recent being Kafka On The Shore.
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