Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World Review

This early work by Haruki Murakami gives tantalizing glimpses of the otherworldly imagination he'd hone to near-perfection in afterwards novels. Indeed, said imagination appears to have sprung fully formed from his cortex.Difficult-Boiled Wonderland and the Finish of the World may not ever exist consistent in tone or execution, but it'due south often vivid and always utterly unlike nigh anything else on the racks. It'southward like a game of hide-and-get-seek in the playground of the mind, where the true nature of self is just a fiddling too well hidden to exist found. Philip Chiliad. Dick fans and those who enjoy stories that get off on exploring inner rather than outer space ought to have a whale of a time with this.

Murakami'southward whimsical risk is a not-quite-noir, non-quite-cyberpunk, not-quite-mythological mashup whose hero is, quite literally, searching for his own mind. Information technology runs ii parallel storylines. InHard-Boiled Wonderland, the unnamed narrator is a "calcutec" working for the System, in a almost-time to come (?) alternate Japan where information is the ultimate currency. The Arrangement's chief rival is the Manufactory, which employs Semiotecs. Their goal is to pirate knowledge produced by the System and make information technology available on the black marketplace, while saving the choicest pieces for themselves. That this story predated the p2p craze by nearly a decade actually raises my estimation of Murakami's skills at innovative thinking quite a few notches.

Our hero is similar a biological encryption device, running coded information through one hemisphere of his brain, scrambling it, and spitting information technology out the other. This talent was achieved through a process in which his "cadre consciousness" was isolated and firewalled, so to speak, deep within his brain, destroying many of his memories into the deal. When he undertakes a fragile task for a rather wacked-out professor who's developed a means of dull sound, he finds himself upwardly to his eyeballs in a crazy plot and a race confronting time to terminate a process that could pb to the destruction of his cadre consciousness itself.

The concurrent storyline,The End of the World, has, again, an unnamed narrator with full amnesia near his previous life. He finds himself in a mysterious walled boondocks whose few inhabitants lack normal emotional responses, and golden-furred unicorns roam the fields only to freeze to death in the winter. It soon becomes clear what this town is: the other narrator's isolated core consciousness. Merely information technology's still a brilliantly rendered literary device, as our hero, throughout both of his storylines, undertakes perilous journeys — one underground, in a sequence reminiscent of ancient mythological voyages into the underworld, and the other solely inside the confines of his walled boundaries, where dangerous areas like the deep eastern forest and the whirlpool represent hazardous regions of inner turmoil — all in the goal of piecing himself back together.

There'due south a lot of full-on comedy at work here, particularly in theHard-Boiled chapters, where several absurd supporting characters turn up to riff on the tropes of the noir genre. There are the obligatory heavies who turn up at our narrator's apartment to threaten him with null in particular, then trash the place simply to practise it. And the femme fatale in the class of the professor's plump, flighty, and not peculiarly vampish daughter. This tone is contrasted, sometimes jarringly only never without involvement, with the haunting, elegiac and almost narcotic mood ofThe Cease of the World, where the imagery frequently evokes a dream surroundings where you know you can't stay, merely somehow tin't bear to leave.

Thematically, Murakami explores the nature of selfhood, the fashion in which who we are is entirely defined by the experiences and memories that contain our consciousness. Take away all memory, and what kind of person would you have? How would that person possess any kind of individuality, without recall to the events that shape personal development? Of course, Murakami never makes the mistake of taking himself likewise seriously when playing around with this stuff, and the result is a delectable picayune literary eccentricity.

huynhloppor.blogspot.com

Source: http://sff180.com/reviews/m/murakami/hard_boiled_wonderland.html

Share this post