This is where Murakami is at his short and neat writing style, with witty, dynamic and often westernised dialogue, propelled by a sense of suspense and adventure. Add in some inklings – threatening, stinking fishy kind of creatures – lurking in the dark and to be avoided at all costs, and we are well and truly in Murakami territory. Our narrator is a Calcutec – a human data processor – and his latest project sees him navigating a secret underground cavernous world at the centre of Tokyo, leading to the secret lab of an eccentric old man, aided by his granddaughter.
Enter Murakami’s propensity for the slightly off-kilter reality.
However, as is also often the case, our narrator is about to get himself embroiled in the most unusual of situations. He lives alone, he likes his beer, he whips up delectable snacks at the drop of a hat, he loves his jazz and his western culture. One part: a Tokyo muchly similar to contemporary Tokyo but with a cyber twist, where our narrator lives a life typical to all Murakami’s male narrators in their 30s or so. Finding memories, he argues, is the key to undoing the consciousness sealed off in the narrator’s mind.Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a story of two parts and two worlds, a story that encapsulates two very different sides of Haruki Murakami’s writing.
Yet, the narrator believes that, even without his shadow, “little by little, I will recall things And as I remember, I may find the key to my own creation, and to its undoing” (399). The shadow says, “I got most of our memories, but what am I supposed to do with them? In order to make sense, we’d have to be put back together, which is not going to happen” (247). The narrator in the end of the world is separated from his shadow, who holds their memories in the Shadow Grounds and later escapes through the Southern Pool with them. The shuffling surgery causes him to have false memories and lose some brain space that held memories. Forget the end of the world, I was ready to reclaim my whole self” (239). The hard-boiled narrator wants to get his “stolen memories back and live. Both narrators suffer from memory alteration. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World raises many questions about the relationship between memory and identity.
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