Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

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Bittersweet Ending: The End of the World plot, leading to a Downer Ending for the Hard-Boiled Wonderland plot.

Menslow, Scott (August 7, 2015). "Your Literary Playlist: A Guide to the Music of Haruki Murakami". The Week . Retrieved July 13, 2022. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World ( 世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド, Sekai no Owari to Hādo-Boirudo Wandārando) is a 1985 novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. It was awarded the Tanizaki Prize in 1985. The English translation by Alfred Birnbaum was released in 1991. A strange and dreamlike novel, its chapters alternate between two narratives—"Hard-Boiled Wonderland" (the cyberpunk, science fiction part) and "The End of the World" (the surreal, virtual fantasy part). Even if Mr. Murakami couldn't develop his thematic material, he might have kept his readers' interest if he had used language in a way that wasn't inert and commonplace. The translation, one suspects, was not Hairston, Marc (2007). Lunning, Frenchy (ed.). "Fly Away Old Home: Memory and Salvation in Haibane-Renmei". Mechademia. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 2: 238. doi: 10.1353/mec.0.0014. ISBN 978-0-8166-5266-2. ISSN 1934-2489. OCLC 72523390. S2CID 120340635.Many of the notable scenes of the novel take place deep underground beneath Tokyo, but we’re at least given descriptions of under which landmarks the characters are traversing. Much of the action happens in between Sendagaya and Aoyama-Itchome stations. The reference to "The End of the World" is obvious in Japanese editions of the novel because an epigraph quotes from the lyrics and credits for the song are appended at the end. For some reason, however, neither epigraph nor credits are included in the English translation, which obscures the musical reference and has led one critic to mistakenly identify the song as originating with the Carpenters in the 1970s. [6] female librarian shows him how. If this sounds like a mishmash of Kafka, Dino Buzzati's novel "The Tartar Steppe" and the movies "Blade Runner" and "Alphaville," then you have some idea The familiar unfamiliar is all in place - another great read for those who have been on Planet Murakami before. If you have never experienced the all-encompassing, all engrossing world that is contained singly across Haruki Murakami’s œuvre then this would be the perfect starting point. Sorry; I digress. The title describes the story perfectly because one of the linked narratives concerns The End Of The World (and I guarantee that phrase does not mean, here, what you think it means) and the other takes place in a sparse, monochromatic and sharp-edged subset of modern Japan. This latter, by following many of the 'rules' of the Hard-Boiled genre, manages to invoke its inspirations, references and homages almost by what it leaves out rather than what it puts in. The protagonist, whose name we never learn, in this tale inhabits a modern profession, one involving data, espionage, conflict, organizations bent on domination, greed, destructive curiosity, whisky, cigarettes, semi-automatic pistols, codes, codebreaking, surveillance, apartment-trashing toughs, switchblades, credit cards, mysterious superiors, The Professor, The Girl, the Macguffin and the Enemy. Hence, with all these stereotypes out to play, the Wonderland - a Hard-Boiled one, at that.

Granddaughter: You sometimes get so wrapped up in what you're doing, you don't even think about the trouble you make for others. Remember that ankle-fin experiment? The very title of the work is almost an integral puzzle. The two parts of the sentence might almost serve as anagrams of each other; different enough to assure us they don't, but close enough that I keep trying to subtract 'the's and such to make the comparison work. Again, I don't have the link, but it's there, I assure you. I prefer to hope that whatever the link is, it's survived the translation to English; or, better, it is something that I have been given the tools to build, tools which transcend language, and now I must simply construct it on my own. This novel also serves as the perfect working definition of that most difficult of definitions - Post Modernism and is thrilling, enthralling and hard to put down once you’ve started. Where the narrative leads is an essential part of the experience. As you read you start to engage and build meaning or simply enjoy the experience. Murakami's prose is almost literally violet. Although I'm not sure how, its intense evocative and visual content rings of the original Japanese text. I'm not qualified to say that; I've never seen the original text and couldn't read it if I did. I have to trust that Birnbaum was able to capture Murakami's fevered use of language and distill as much of it as possible into the more mechanical, cipherlike English. While not as firmly attached to vision as, say, various forms of Chinese, Japanese nonetheless always invokes a visual response in me. Of course, this could just be because I like anime.His fantasies, with their easy reference to western pulp fiction and music, retain a beauty of the mind Guardian Murakami's books are often categorized in "Sci-Fi/Fantasy", but I believe that is mis-labeling. I have read (well, listened to) "Kafka on the shore", "1Q84", "Wind-up bird chronicle", and "Dance, Dance, Dance", and they are not SF, in my opinion - they have core elements other than SF.