Much is promised in the expansive title of Haruki Murakami's 1985 novel. And much is delivered in the course of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World . I will leave it to other readers to determine whether this books actually concludes with the “end of the world,” but along the way Murakami lives up to the ‘Wonderland’ designation, cramming wild and disparate elements into his story: unicorns, gangsters, sci-fi concepts, spy novel conceits, magic and mystery, love and the unconscious.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World , published in Japan in 1985 when the author was 36-years-old, anticipates many themes and techniques that would recur in Murakami's later novels. The juxtaposition of modern urban reality and the phantasmagorical, already hinted at in Murakami's Trilogy of the Rat , plays a key role in the plot. Although his next novel, Norwegian Wood , moved away from this highly stylized form of magical realism, it would return as a trademark of Murakami’s mid- and late-career oeuvre. Here too we encounter his technique of presenting two contrasting yet converging narratives in alternating chapters—an approach he would use with great success in 1Q84 . Here also are the familiar Murakami obsessions: books, cooking, music, animals and subterranean places.
If Murakami's Tokyo is magical, it is also remarkably Westernized. Readers familiar with this author won’t be surprised by the constant allusions to American and British popular culture. In these pages, we encounter a taxi driver who rhapsodizes about the band The Police, a video rental store owner pitching the benefits of Alfred Hitchcock, a car rental agency clerk fascinated by Bob Dylan, and other similar references.
At first glance, the two storylines in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World seem to have nothing in common. The first plot focuses on the exploits of an unnamed narrator, an operative in high-tech surveillance wars who works as an encryptor for The System, a quasi-governmental intelligence agency. He has been assigned to help an eccentric scientist who is pursuing a top-secret research project in an underground lair hidden beneath the sewers and subways of Tokyo. The second story involves another unnamed narrator, who is living in a pastoral walled community populated by strange people and unicorns. His memory of his life before coming to The Town is vague, and our protagonist is troubled by the requirement that all residents of the community must abandon their shadows—he comes to fear that losing his shadow is tantamount to relinquishing his mind and past life.
The first story proceeds as a combined espionage and science fiction tale, filled with thugs, intrigue and radical technology. Reading these pages, you will be hardly surprised to learn that Murakami first learned English by making his way through gritty American crime novels—he launched his foreign literary studies with The Name Is Archer , by Ross MacDonald. The word "hardboiled" in the title of this novel is no coincidence, indicating a debt and signaling a stylistic predilection.
The second plot line in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World could hardly offer a starker contrast—it is fabulistic, Jungian and mythological by turns. Our narrator has reluctantly abandoned his shadow, which is kept confined on the outskirts of town, but grows sickly now that it has been separated from an organic body. Our shadowless hero has taken a job as a "Dreamreader," a position that requires him to extract remnants of memories from the skulls of unicorns. He forges a close relationship with a lovely lady librarian, who assists him in his official responsibilities. But he continues to confer and conspire with his shadow, and under the latter's encouragement begins to make a map of the walled community—perhaps for use in plotting their joint escape.
In time, these two dichotomous plots are connected, but in an quasi-hallucinogenic reality-inside-a-reality way that is more akin to Philip K. Dick than to any precedent in Japanese literature. I must admit some disappointment when, midway through the novel, Murakami attempts to provide a clear, coherent scientific explanation for all the strange incidents in this novel. In his later books, our author allows more ambiguity, cultivating mysteries rather than trying to solve them. But even the most inventive theoretical hypotheses can hardly cut through the many enigmas of this strange novel.
Storytelling has always been conversant with magic, and in the two decades preceding the release of this novel a new breed of magical realism began making waves of the literary world. But Murakami offers a different twist—metropolitan big city magic for jaded sophisticates, a fantasy capable of inhabiting skyscrapers and subways and crowded intersections during rush hour. So yes, this is clearly a hardboiled book, but also a blueprint for fanciful reinvention of the urban novel. Still ahead in this author’s career would come more fully realized 'wonderland' novels: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , Kafka on the Shore , 1Q84 , but the foundation was set here, in this quirky work, both a departure and an arrival in the career of a seminal novelist.