inthelouvre.org

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

While I was at my grandfather’s house in between viewings, my mom and I were sitting on the big sofa that faces the TV. I had my book open and on my lap, but I wasn’t reading because I was soaking in family stories and tid bits of information about those who are related to me. She turned to me and asked what I was reading, then told me to describe what it was about and whether or not I thought she’d like it. Most of her reading tends towards romance paperbacks, so I told her she probably wouldn’t like this one. It’s “smart” fiction, I said, but I didn’t really mean that in an insulting way. It makes you think, wonder about possibilities; it made me want to separate the functions of my left and right brains and see what I could figure out about each.

The chapters in this book alternate between the Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (hence the title). In the first world, the narrator is a “Calutec” - a human data processor/encryption system. He works for the System, which as far as I could tell was a government agency, and he spends his time trying to avoid the Semiotics who work for the Factory and try to steal information from the Calutecs. The narrator is hired by a genius scientist who is experimenting on sound waves; he can remove sound from certain items (not least his granddaughter’s speech) and can enhance sound far beyond the realm of human tolerance. The narrator is asked to encrypt some data vital to the research so that the scientist’s findings cannot be misused.

The narrator of the End of the World has just recently entered this world. The character must be removed from his shadow, who will eventually die, and must work as the Dreamreader. He visits the library every evening with slits in his eyes that make it difficult for him to open his eyes in sunlight but which allow him to read the Old Dreams from the skulls of unicorns. The Town is surrounded by the Wall and the ever mysterious and harmful Woods. No one who lives in the Town knows where they came from; neither do they age. It’s a peaceful place with no fighting, hatred or desire. It was at one point described as the perfect utopia.

Everything eventually comes back together in the end, like things usually do in Haruki Murakami’s books. When I was telling my mom about it, one of the things I mentioned was that a lot of “stuff” happens, and it’s all very well-written and easy to comprehend, but you don’t really know what’s going on until the end. It’s adventurous and mysterious (in the detective as well as the magical sense), but when it all comes together you’ve either proven your hypotheses or realized how totally off you were. Either way, you’re happy with it.

Okay, it’s true, it sounds like a weird science-fiction novel - this guy has had surgery to separate parts of his brain; he’s even received a new line of function which I don’t quite understand fully myself. It’s technical, but I get the overall gist. There’s a world inside his brain. But this is what I love about magic realism as a genre - it’s not written in that science-fictiony way where the author knows this couldn’t possibly real, so let’s throw some completely fantastic ideas in and make our characters react as if, whoa, are you serious? Murakami’s writing is so down-to-earth and straight-forward that the events of this book almost seem natural.

I think the back cover mentions that it’s a fascinating take on how the mind works, and I couldn’t agree more. As I mentioned, it made me want to explore all the abilities of my brain; it makes me sad that there is so much going on that I don’t even know about, that under layers and layers of thick ego, somewhere down there are memories I can’t recall or stories which I’ve made up but may never have access to. There are all these unexplored bits and pieces that even those smarter than me (brain scientists, I suppose) haven’t a clue exist, and let’s just mention the argument of where/what the mind is, how it functions, what it means to have a “mind,” and what happens when you lose it. And where does it go when you die?

It’s part surreal, part believable. At one point the narrator in the End of the World tells the Librarian that if she can believe, it means she has some part of her mind left in her, because you can’t go on believing things if you’ve lost your mind (not in the crazy sense, I must mention, but just in that the Town people don’t have minds, they are too peaceful and correct to think about emotions and ideas). It’s a fairy tale way of thinking; if you don’t believe in fairies, they won’t exist, but if you do, you could probably bring one back to life (just by clapping your hands!).

I wouldn’t recommend this, by any means, as someone’s first Haruki Murakami book. It’s weird and I’m not sure I would have been so into it had I not had several of his other books as backdrop. He has a certain style of writing that you have to be into before you can fully enjoy the other books. I’ve read people who recommend The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as a first Murakami book, but I haven’t read that one yet. I still recommend Kafka on the Shore, but it was my first and I fell too in love with it to do anything except read the rest of his books. I suppose it really depends on what you like, but this book quickly became a favorite overall fiction book, not least just a favorite Murakami title.

On our way home from Ohio, at that point almost completed with the book, I told my mom that I was incorrect in saying it was “smart” fiction; it was actually “thinking” fiction. It’s not that there are lots of big words, and you’d have to stop and re-read paragraphs to really understand what is going on; it’s not that you have to have formal literary training to really get it. It’s more that it’s intelligent; it’s thought-provoking. It was easy for me to get lost in the worlds described. It was interesting enough to have me asking questions and wondering about what was going to happen next. It grasped me and wouldn’t let go until I was done, but sometimes I think it still hasn’t let me go because I find myself slipping into blank stares while I think of my subconscious and what could possibly be going on in there. What would my peaceful world be like? What would yours be?