Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel (Vintage International) by Haruki Murakami Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel (Vintage International)
Book Review: A thrilling story!
Summary: 5 Stars
I have always been a huge fan of Murakami. I wrote a review stating that South of The Border, West of The Sun was my favourite novel but frankly, I can't decide between the two books!
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a sci-fi/adventure/romantic/thiller story. How can he possibly combine all of this in one story? Well, the main character has been trained as a human computer to be able to memorize and shuffle data in a way that makes it inaccessible and confidential. When he stumbles upon a mad-scientist figure at the beginning of the book ,the story is about to take an unexpected horrible twist as our hero finds out what his real purpose is.
At the same time, we follow another character who lives in a fantasy world and works as a 'dream-reader', who is following a similar destructive track as the other hero. Both men have to deal with the terrible secrets they have been forced to hide in their minds by forces outwith their control and they have to choose to destroy or be destroyed.
In a wonderfully realistic fairy-tale-turned-nightmare type of story, Murakami explores the human mind and its possibilities and the true potential of humans for free will which can be either detrimental or life-changing.
Read this book with an open mind and allow yourself to be carried away into Murakami's world of wobots and unicorns and to meditate on your own free will. This book is a must-read for all Murakami lovers and an excellent introduction to his style of writing if you have never read his novels before. Highly recommended!
Book Review: Possibly Murakami's masterpiece
Summary: 4 Stars
The second earliest Murakami novel to be translated into English (1985; translated 1991), this is one of the last that I read (2005). It is Murakami's most architecturally complex, ambitious and coherent work to date. This could even be his masterpiece. I rated it 4-star after my first reading, finding it quite hard-going in the first third. Reading it again, there is no doubt it merits a 5.
The novel's plot deals with information wars in a surprisingly futuristic-seeming mid-1980s Tokyo (Duran Duran are in the charts and Jim Morrison has been dead 15 years). The book consists of two narrative threads, a 'real world' and a kind of fantasy world (the 'End of the World' of the title), seemingly unrelated to one another. Boku has had his head tampered with. His core consciousness (the End of the World thread of the narrative) has been isolated, and a time bomb is ticking. When it goes off, his life in the real world will end and he will migrate, for good, into his core consciousness (The End of the World), losing everything he has - but with the possibility of gaining it back. What is more, once he is in his core consciousness, he will stay there forever, becoming, in effect, immortal. This is explained by way of some complex psychological and mathematical explanations and is, from what I can tell, ground-breaking stuff in the history of human intellectual development (I feel foolish saying that, but it's all in chapters 25 and 27 if you don't believe me).
Gradually, in a process expertly controlled by Murakami, the relationship between the two worlds becomes clear. By the end of the book they merge into a whole, leading to one of the most moving and upsetting climaxes of any book I have ever read, all to the strains of the old Irish folk song 'Danny Boy', a song which reoccurs time and again in the book, serving as a subliminal link between the two worlds.
The gurgling of the river being sucked under the perimeter wall of the End of the World, something which we see quite early on, and then again at the end, haunts the book, signalling the constant message: no way out. In fact, the book resonates a poignant sense of loss and sadness throughout. This emanates from the End of the World chapters, but permeates both worlds, despite the real world boku's wise-cracking persona. One of the saddest things is that each time boku gains something in the End of the World, he feels an unfounded and incongruous sense of loss and sadness ("I am filled with sadness, although I cannot locate the source" - pg 149). This kind of emotion is known as 'aware' in Japanese, but here it is given some kind of concrete basis, which nevertheless doesn't become clear until later on, leaving the reader with that traditional sense of unfounded loss and sadness. The reason for this emotion is that the objects and people that inhabit the End of the World are only the 'shadows' of corresponding objects and people in the real world, automatons unconsciously constructed by boku. As he remarks himself, things seem "recreated from memory": none of it, and none of the inhabitants, are real; they are only facets of himself. He later realises this, accepting that every part of the Town is a part of his own self. But earlier on, each time he gets close to the Librarian he becomes unconsciously aware that she is not real and that he can never really get close to her at all: he has lost her, for good.
I don't really get why the real world thread also has elements of the fantastical (for example, the mythical Japanese kappa lives in a network of subterranean tunnels and cavities underneath Tokyo). I suppose I'll just have to read it again...
Book Review: Dreamscapes
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is likely to have a profound effect on anyone that reads it. There are some dreams that have a bleakness about them, a sense of jepoardy and emptiness that carries right through to the next day. You wake feeling detached from the real world and sit for hours lost in your own thoughts. This book taps into that universal feeling, that world sadness that washes over us from time to time.
Murakami manages to draw you into a place that is so different from the mundane routines we inhabit and yet so familiar. This book is compelling, it is complex, it is the human psyche turned into a story. It is, above all, an amazing novel.
Book Review: Hard Boiled Wonderland - Murakami
Summary: 5 Stars
I've just finished this book, and i was hugely impressed with yet another slice of the immensley talented murakami's work.
Unicorns, conciousness, left and right brain...not something that initially would interest lots of people, but just for the sheer brilliance of how the two stories running parralell manage to intertwine, you must read this book.
I could fill this review with superlatives about the pace and atmosphere, but the way Murakami manages to display such imagination is nothing short of stunning, and speaks volumes about what is contained within this surreal tale. Excellent stuff yet again from one of the worlds greatest authors.
Book Review: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Summary: 4 Stars
This a really interesting book. Murakami has a very distinct style, mixing lyrical prose with deeper philosophical ideas. However, the book is let down by the editing; it has not been properly proof-read which is incredibly frustrating as there are some sections where the meaning of the sentence is lost because the words are jumbled or repeated in a way that is indecipherable.
The book itself is very readable, placing two stories side-by-side, and alternating their telling each chapter. The unnamed narrator, like most of Murakami's narrators, is a fairly ordinary guy who gets drawn into something bigger than his lot and must wade through these new problems to reach a solution. It's almost like a detective book, mixed with elements sci-fi. The book is most interested when Murakami begins his discussion of the human consciousness, identity, and how outside stimulants can affect it. Though it's quite a large topic, Murakami stays away scientific techno-babble and describes it in easily manageable sections that are thought-provoking but not confusing.
On surface level you have an intriguing narrative with several quirky characters and an interesting way of moving the story forward in the two plots placed side-by-side. Everything is cleverly interlinked, and though the story seems to end quite abruptly, almost on a note of sadness, it's up there with my favourite Murakami books. I just wish the editors would take more time over their proof-reads.