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, Independent Bittersweet Ending: The End of the World plot, leading to a Downer Ending for the Hard-Boiled Wonderland plot. female librarian shows him how. If this sounds like a mishmash of Kafka, Dino Buzzati's novel "The Tartar Steppe" and the movies "Blade Runner" and "Alphaville," then you have some idea

The very title of the work is almost an integral puzzle. The two parts of the sentence might almost serve as anagrams of each other; different enough to assure us they don't, but close enough that I keep trying to subtract 'the's and such to make the comparison work. Again, I don't have the link, but it's there, I assure you. I prefer to hope that whatever the link is, it's survived the translation to English; or, better, it is something that I have been given the tools to build, tools which transcend language, and now I must simply construct it on my own. This novel also serves as the perfect working definition of that most difficult of definitions - Post Modernism and is thrilling, enthralling and hard to put down once you’ve started. Where the narrative leads is an essential part of the experience. As you read you start to engage and build meaning or simply enjoy the experience. love, sex, memory, dreams, skulls, unicorns -- is usually prosaic. Why was he allowed to narrate a book? To demonstrate that jejune people are manipulating the gadgets of our time? It may be a valid point, but this isn't Mind Rape: The procedure required so that a Calcutec can use the "shuffling" technique to encrypt data.Wow, this was an awesome listen. I became a Murakami fan after listening to "1q84" and this was my second Murakami title. I am just as impressed. I found the story riveting, and I couldn't wait to see what happened next. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End Of The World is a novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. There. That's the basics of it. In the original Japanese, the narrator uses the more formal first-person pronoun watashi to refer to himself in the Hard-Boiled Wonderland narrative and the more intimate boku in the End of the World narrative. Translator Alfred Birnbaum achieved a similar effect in English by writing the End of the World sections in the present tense. [1] 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. 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.

Popular music and jazz figure prominently in many of Murakami's stories. [2] The title Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World contains a reference to the 1962 pop hit "The End of the World," written by Arthur Kent and Sylvia Dee and sung by Skeeter Davis. Davis's version reached No. 2 on both Billboard's Hot 100 chart [3] and Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart. [4] [ circular reference] A cover version released in the US by Herman's Hermits in 1965 reached No. 1 in that country as the B-side of "I'm Henry VIII, I Am." [5] Sorry; I digress. The title describes the story perfectly because one of the linked narratives concerns The End Of The World (and I guarantee that phrase does not mean, here, what you think it means) and the other takes place in a sparse, monochromatic and sharp-edged subset of modern Japan. This latter, by following many of the 'rules' of the Hard-Boiled genre, manages to invoke its inspirations, references and homages almost by what it leaves out rather than what it puts in. The protagonist, whose name we never learn, in this tale inhabits a modern profession, one involving data, espionage, conflict, organizations bent on domination, greed, destructive curiosity, whisky, cigarettes, semi-automatic pistols, codes, codebreaking, surveillance, apartment-trashing toughs, switchblades, credit cards, mysterious superiors, The Professor, The Girl, the Macguffin and the Enemy. Hence, with all these stereotypes out to play, the Wonderland - a Hard-Boiled one, at that.

The novel contains examples of:

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... The familiar unfamiliar is all in place - another great read for those who have been on Planet Murakami before. If you have never experienced the all-encompassing, all engrossing world that is contained singly across Haruki Murakami’s œuvre then this would be the perfect starting point. While I’m not sure of the original publication date, the English title came out in 1991. Over twenty years old, this makes it one of Murakami’s earlier works and it feels that way. Even if Mr. Murakami couldn't develop his thematic material, he might have kept his readers' interest if he had used language in a way that wasn't inert and commonplace. The translation, one suspects, was not 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.