Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Gosh, this is a hard book to summarize. This book takes you on a rollicking roller-coaster ride, part science-fiction, part fantasy, and full bizarre.

Half the chapters are set in Tokyo, where an unnamed narrator negotiates underground worlds populated by INKlings, dodges opponents of both sides of a raging high-tech infowar, and engages in an affair with a beautiful librarian with an enormous appetite.

In alternating chapters, a narrator who lives in a strange land called The End of the World tries to reunite with his mind and his shadow and escape from this strange land back to where he came.

Both worlds share one common theme – Unicorn skulls that moan and groan.

My Review

So does the synopsis sound interesting to you? Honestly, if I read this, I would close the book and put it back on the library shelf. Too bizarre for me.

The actual synopsis on the back of the book mentioned something vague about the Tokyo underworld, and I went into the book with the idea that this was a book about the Japanese mafia. No prizes for guessing how surprised I got as I read further and further into the book. It all just got curioser and curioser if I may paraphrase Alice in Wonderland.

The surprise is quite pleasant, though.

The book is well-written and fast-moving, and there is a very suspenseful aspect to the book that kept me reading late into the night.

The chapter titles and The End of the World map bring a strong fantastical aspect to the book. Chapter titles? Why am I blathering about chapter titles? To explain, I include the titles of the first two chapters here:

1. Elevator, Silence, Overweight
2. Golden Beasts

I don’t know about you, but I usually don’t notice chapter titles much. But these made me stop right in my tracks and try to think through the events within.

And of course, the unicorns are so bizarre, so out-there, and provide another fantastical aspect to the book.

Now, apart from bizarre and fantastic, you do want to know what the book’s all about, don’t you?

If I told you, the tragedy is that it would spoil the fun of reading the book. So, after leaving all these intriguing (I hope!) hints, I want to tell you that reading this book is worth the time. It is the literary equivalent of The Matrix movie, and if you liked The Matrix, well, you will like this book. I guarantee it!

If you don’t like books where you don’t know what is happening, or you like books that spell things out explicitly, this book isn’t for you.

Ending this review with one last thought

It sounds odd to say this, but this book is especially memorable for the protagonist’s music and literature taste. The book is peppered with numerous references, and it seemed to me that perhaps Murakami was adding in his personal preferences. It immediately made me want to create a playlist (singers like Bob Dylan and John Coltrane and many classical music references) and read some Russian literature (Turgenev! Dostoyevsky!). This is pretty high-brow stuff!

Here is a small snippet to illustrate what I am saying:

I love this snippet because when I read The Brothers Karamazov, I remember reading this and going, What??? After reading this book, I think I began to understand what he meant. I can be really slow sometimes 😀

This is the first book I log as part of the Japanese Literature Challenge hosted by Dolce Belezza.