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