Wow. What a read. This is my first proper experience of Murakami in long form, discounting the short stories of After the Quake, and I must say that he is different from anything I’ve ever read before. Coherent yet baffling, this story was at times a thriller, at times like fantasy, and at times like sci-fi, blended together with magical realism to a profound effect.

A good woodsman has only one scar on him. No more, no less.

Before digging into the story I want to dwell on this quote for a bit. It is a piece of advice from a townsman to our narrator, who is a newcomer, on the deep woods within the town known to be dangerous. The quote embodies an idea that I’ve been thinking about for a long time but couldn’t find a good way to explain without sounding very pessimistic, which is how we humans can’t truly take from the advice of others and rather must experience everything firsthand. A woodsman with no scars is inexperienced no matter how much he hears from older woodsmen; he will still be rash and unwary until the day it gets him in trouble. This is true for every profession and industry as well. Think of all the tragedies that had to happen for us to learn our lessons—Challenger, Deepwater Horizon, 9/11, the list goes on and on. Imagine how advanced of a society we would live in if we were diligent enough to be able to prevent stuff like that from happening in the first place. Failing that, even properly learning from those tragedies would be sufficient. But, as we know, Deepwater Horizon was not the first oil spill, and it wasn’t the last either. It just had a larger magnitude of impact, giving it more publicity, leading to more legislative measures. It’s so unfortunate that publicity is needed for us to properly handle literally anything instead of just brushing it under the rug.

Back to the book, the first thing I noticed after picking it up is the unusual title, and I don’t think it is some artifact of translation that made it this way. What makes the most sense to me is that the title corresponds to the two worlds within the novel: “Hard-Boiled Wonderland,” and, “The End of the World,” yes, literally a world with that name.

We are introduced to Hard-Boiled Wonderland in the first chapter, set in contemporary (this was written in 1985) Japan, but with a technocratic twist. Two infotech corporations, the System and the Semiotecs, embodying order and chaos respectively, are locked in a game of cops and robbers. The System seeks to protect information, while the Semiotecs operate to unravel the work done by the System. Our narrator is an employee of the System, a “Calcutec,” who all have a cyborg-like ability to encrypt information using the mind through “shuffling” and “laundering.”

The second chapter cuts to The End of the World, a name which I take has less of a doomsday meaning and rather has more of an air of finality, like the last paper in a stack of homework or the platform at the end of a pier. The narrator here, who I believe is the same narrator as that of Hard-Boiled Wonderland, arrives at an antique town surrounded on all sides by a tall wall. In a jarring scene we see the Gatekeeper of the town use a knife to sever the narrator’s shadow from him on the ground, and the narrator enters the town after bidding his shadow a temporary goodbye.

There’s an obvious link between the world of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the world of The End of the World. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland, an old professor responsible for the invention of the technology that enables the narrator’s Calcutec abilities states that he has visualized the narrator’s “core consciousness,” going on to perfectly describe the walled town from The End of the World. What’s not so straightforward is the synchronization of the timelines of the two worlds. The novel alternates between them every chapter, a structure which indicates that they are happening in parallel. However, the storyline within each of these worlds suggests that they happened in sequence. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland, the old professor reveals that due to one of his experiments gone awry, our narrator will now transition into The End of the World. In The End of the World, the narrator has just arrived at a town at The End of the World, presumably after leaving Hard-Boiled Wonderland. But then there are points in the story that must be happening in parallel. Towards the end, the narrator of Hard-Boiled Wonderland sings Danny Boy, and in The End of the World, the narrator, who had until then been unable to remember any music, manages to play Danny Boy on the accordion. Even more mystically, the unicorn skull our narrator gifted to the librarian in Hard-Boiled Wonderland starts to glow when the narrator from The End of the World is trying to find the mind of the town’s librarian within all of the skulls in the library. And in both worlds the narrators seem to be working against the same deadline. For Hard-Boiled Wonderland it is the twenty-nine hours he has until the turnover, and for The End of the World it is the time that his shadow has left to live, as his shadow will die in the winter. Given all of this, I will move forward with the understanding that Hard-Boiled Wonderland happens in parallel to The End of the World.

So, what is the nature of the world of The End of the World? An easy interpretation is that this world exists solely in the mind of Hard-Boiled Wonderland’s narrator. Most of the old professor’s wording validates this line of thinking, that Hard-Boiled Wonderland is the “real” world and The End of the World is made up. People and objects in The End of the World are shadowy reflections of the same people and objects in the real world, most significantly the librarians in both worlds whom both narrators have a thing for. But the fatal flaw in this theory is how the unicorn skull, a replica of skulls in the library of The End of the World manufactured by the professor, starts to glow as the narrator in The End of the World is interacting with the skulls in the library. This wasn’t some figment of Hard-Boiled Wonderland’s narrators’ imagination either, his more-than-friend librarian is also able to see the light and feel the heat it emanates.

What does winter in the town mean? What does a person’s shadow represent? What to make of the old professor’s actions, the absolute character that is his granddaughter, the “inklings” and various other terrifying underground monsters in this world? So much of this story is beyond me. All I can say is that this novel was wondrous, enigmatic, innovative—truly, a marvel, and I will look forward to exploring more of Murakami’s work.