Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)

https://youtu.be/SjJHH6IL3Nc ( )

Different... but incredibly engaging. I couldn't put it down.
This was my first book from Murakami. I have been looking at his books for a couple of years now and finally got one. I'm most likely going to get another.

Murakami's writing is excellent. In this novel, he weaves together two tales. As the book goes on, the threads of similarity weave the two stories closer together.

My guess is that his writing won't be for everyone, but his edge of fantasy mixed with pop culture mixed with geeky science entertained me. ( )

This is quintessential Murakami -- disarmingly profound, surrealistically realistic, a fantasy novel disguised as a detective thriller that ends up being a meditation on the nature of mind. It all just works with the deceptive simplicity that's the trademark of Murakami's genius. As always, his straightforward prose serves as a foil for the delightful weirdness of the story. If you've never read a Murakami novel before, this would be an excellent place to start. I'm going to be thinking (and maybe dreaming) about this story for weeks. ( )

This book was recommended by a friend when I asked for books outside my comfort zone that I should read.

The conceit of this book, where it swaps between two rather fantastical stories, worked really well for me. I get that one of the stories was supposed to be 'contemporary' Japan, but there were enough weirdnesses, particularly on the part of the elderly scientist side character, that urban fantasy seems the most logical category. To begin with, I didn't follow what was going on with the two settings, and appreciated the slow reveal as to how they were connected.

Sadly, I did not really warm to either protagonist. Murakami's habit of not naming characters* didn't help there, because the kinds of epithets used in the descriptions of the characters felt forced. Given that this was a translation, I wondered how much of that was the translator being faithful to the original language, rather than choosing language that might have fit better to the poetry of the story. Both were just a bit too blokey, just a bit too weird about the women that they interacted with, and left me just a bit squicked for large parts of the story. As such, I read it in small sections.

The reading in small pieces didn't really matter in terms of the following of the story -- it is so disjointed, so frequently random, that not having remembered the details never seemed to matter.

In contrast to the characterisation and the story, I found the world-building fascinating and detailed. The second environment, a walled town that could not be left, where one's shadow is cut off and left outside die, was slowly illustrated as the protagonist learned about their new environment.

Do I recommend it? If you like complex noir urban fantasy, yes. If you like some amount of coherence in your story, some complexity in your characterisation, then no. Suspension of disbelief is not enough for this story.

* At some point during the reading of this story, I read an interview with Murakami, in which they talked about their difficulties with naming characters, and that to begin with they just didn't. My understanding is that this novel is part of that body of work, and thus it isn't a stylistic design to separate the reader and the characters. ( )

A slog. The Hard-Boiled Wonderland narrative killed The End of the World. ( )