Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

He has an amazing ability to tabulate figures, and his talent is much desired in the world of “infowars”, where data is of premium importance, and different factions are fighting one another to obtain it.Ĭharacter B. Via alternating chapters, we follow the lives of two unnamed protagonists (which I’ve noticed is a writing technique that Murakami has used in many of his early books).Ĭharacter A. Is this at all possible, or is it some weird dream or mind trauma? Have I lost you yet? Picture this, a parallel universe, another world that you live in, while simultaneously living in the “real” world. On this re-reading, I felt perhaps even more understanding and sadness for him. I have never forgotten the character of The Shadow, and always carried him around in a small filing cabinet in my mind, knowing I’d meet him again. Have you ever had a book that has always stuck in your mind, and which you just knew you would one day return to? No matter how many years later. And I couldn’t be any other self but myself.

After all, everything - this life I was losing - was me.

(Sept.”Even if I had my life to live over again, I couldn’t imagine not doing things the same. Murakami's ingenuity and inventiveness cannot fail to intoxicate this is a bravura performance. Intertwined with the agent's attempts to understand his plight are scenes from The End of the World. But after interference from a scientist and from the Semiotecs, a rival intelligence unit, the subconscious story is about to replace the agent's own perceptions of reality. Thanks to a wonderland of technology, an intelligence agent has had his brain implanted with a ``profoundly personal drama'' that allows him to ``launder'' and ``shuffle'' classified data, and all that he knows of the drama is its password, The End of the World. Embellished with witticisms, wordplay and allusions to such figures as Stendhal heroes and Lauren Bacall, the tale is set in a Tokyo of the near future. The plot here is so elaborate that about 100 pages, one-fourth of the book, elapse before its various elements begin to fit together, but Murakami's lightning prose more than sustains the reader. There ought to be a name for the genre Murakami ( A Wild Sheep Chase ) has invented, and it might be the literary pyrotechno-thriller.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami