murakami hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world

The title of the book refers to hard-boiled fiction. When we lose our memory, we therefore also lose our identity, and this process is made concrete in a fairy tale-like way in the even chapters in the book.

Themes: memory, identity and storytellingĪn important theme in this book is storytelling, and how our identity is made up of the stories we tell ourselves about ourself. None of the characters are named, which adds to the story’s dream-like atmosphere and matches the theme of identity. It reminded me strongly of Calvino’s Forgotten Cities and the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, so if you enjoyed those this book may be for you. One of the book’s main strengths is that it manages to evoke a compelling, haunting atmosphere where enough small amounts of mystery are revealed to you to make you want to keep reading, while at the same time feeling like you can’t quite put your finger on what exactly is going on. I will try to persuade you to pick it up by discussing its writing and themes instead: Atmosphere I don’t want to discuss the plot of the book too much in this review, as I believe the less you know when you go into it the better. The even chapters take place in a mysterious city where the animals are taken outside of its walls every night and let in again in the morning. The uneven chapters feature a sci-fi-esque Tokyo with human data processors, a gang war going on behind the scenes and a mad professor who works on removing sound.

These two parts appear to be entirely separate at first, with only some overlaps in themes and motifs, but come together at the end of the book. The chapters in this book alternate between the ‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland’ part of the book (uneven chapters) and ‘The End of the World’ (even chapters). Not unlike your average literary work, I’d argue. It’s not uplifting, but this stems from its ‘gritty realistic’ atmosphere full of interesting philosophical musings on the concepts of memory, reality and identity rather than any down-right depressiveness. In retrospect, I think my belief that this book would be depressing was wrong.

Then, a few weeks ago one of my friends suggested that we read this for our book club and I finally picked it up. I had heard that Murakami’s book are very depressing and I was a bit too scared to start. I can’t even remember how long ago I thought ‘I should read some Murakami’ and bought this book. If you’ve already read it, perhaps you’ll enjoy a discussion about its ending (look out for my second post of today). This is a spoiler-free (or at least spoiler-light) review of this book.

Murakami hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world