Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

by Haruki Murakami

First published 2010

The Calcutec works as a human data encryptor, shuffling information through the two hemispheres of his own brain to keep secrets safe from corporate and criminal hands. His latest job pulls him into the underground laboratory of an eccentric scientist, where subterranean monsters called INKlings prowl the sewers beneath Tokyo and a scientist's granddaughter proves far less shy than expected. Running parallel to his story is a quieter, stranger world: a walled town at the End of the World, where a newcomer reads dreams from unicorn skulls and slowly loses the thing that makes him himself. Bob Dylan plays on a record. Lauren Bacall flickers on a screen. Thugs show up at inconvenient moments. The two narratives move forward in alternating chapters, each one pressing toward the same unsettling question: what exactly is consciousness, and what happens when someone else gets control of it? Funny in one sentence and deeply unsettling in the next, this is a novel that treats the human mind as both the setting and the stakes.

Genres: science-fiction, literary-fiction, psychological-thriller, dark-fantasy, surreal

Vibes: darkly-comedic, disorienting, introspective, surreal, thought-provoking, unsettling

Tropes: dual-narrative, loss-of-self, parallel-timelines, unreliable-reality

Setting: Tokyo, End of the World

Period: 20th-century

400 pages · Paperback · Vintage

Content warnings: death, mental-illness

More by Haruki Murakami

• After Dark
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
• Kafka on the Shore
• Norwegian Wood
• South of the Border, West of the Sun
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
• Dance Dance Dance
• The City and Its Uncertain Walls

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