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Reflection

Thoughts on Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

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First, I REALLY enjoyed this work. For a while now, I’ve been meaning to read Murakami’s works, so I’m glad I was able to read this one. It was definitely unlike anything I’d ever read before, and it caused me to reflect on how the mind works and what the subconscious is capable of accomplishing.

After reading the first few chapters, I initially thought that the Narrator in the End of the World was a reincarnation of the Narrator in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, and I guess I was kind of right. There were obvious parallels between the two, especially in regard to their attraction to the Librarians. It would’ve been interesting if the Chubby Girl also had a counterpart in the End of the World, but I don’t think she had a significant enough role in the Narrator’s mind.

At the end, I kind of wish that the Narrator would’ve followed his Shadow into the whirlpool. I think that if he had jumped, he would’ve woken up in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and been able to live out the rest of his life. However, I think the author makes the ending purposely obscure to elicit reflection by the audience and make us question what we would have done in the Narrator’s position.

Furthermore, Murakami uses techniques of other authors, and my favorite references were of those to Tolkien. When I first saw the map, I got really excited because the maps in the Lord of the Rings are iconic, and if this novel was anything like LOTR, I’d probably really enjoy it. However, the plots of each work didn’t share any apparent similarities, but the structure of the novels did. LOTR had dual stories that were separate but connected (Frodo and Sam’s journey vs. everyone else’s), and Murakami uses this technique, but his chapters alternate while Tolkien’s do not. Overall, I really liked Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and I’m looking forward to reading more Murakami novels in the future.

Anna Truong

Reflection

The Relationship of the Mind and Body in Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

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In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami explores the concept of the mind and its relationship with the body, arguing that they are ultimately disconnected, and one can never know their own mind. Murakami presents two parallel universes, one in Tokyo, which often uses past tense, where the narrator is a Calcutech scrambling data using his own mind and the other in the End of the World, which is set in present tense,  where the narrator  is a dreamreader that reads the minds of the Town’s inhabitants.

These two parallel universes are placed side by side throughout the novel rather than having one and then the other to show that they are parallel universes that both exist at once. The Town represents the narrator’s subconscious, and hardboiled wonderland is his reality, but after being experimented upon, he slips into his own subconscious. Murakami demonstrates the skewed temporality of the two worlds when the chubby girl says to the narrator, “your memory is running backward,” which symbolizes that although the End of the World is the world to which the narrator is heading in twenty four hours, he has in a way already experienced the End of the World and remembers the future. This concept of parallel memory tracks highlights Murakami’s argument that the mind and body are disconnected because the narrator’s mind has traveled to places his body has not; it has a reality of its own.

The same idea of the mind and body being disconnected is present when the professor tells the narrator that the world itself will not end, but that the world as the narrator knows it will end; the narrator will enter his subconscious which has always been running in the background unbeknownst to him. It is clear that the End of the World has existed as a parallel reality or as the narrator’s subconscious since the beginning of the novel since the narrator experiences small memories of the other world, and the link between the worlds is the unicorn skull, which symbolizes the minds of the people in the Town.

Just like the people in the Town are mindless because they have been separated from their shadows, the narrator experiences the mind-body disconnect when his shadow jumps through the whirlpool and leaves him in his subconscious. The narrator has left reality and entered his subconscious, never to return. Instead, he exists in the Town, where he will have recollections of the past and the hardboiled wonderland world but will not feel their full force since his mind has left him.

Murakami’s cyperpunk novel uses the fragmentation of the narrator’s mind to comment on the unbridgeable gap between our reality and our subconscious, our body and our mind, and what we have know that we are on Earth and what might lie in wait for us after we have passed on.

– Lauren Hodgson