Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

Klawchat Thursday 1 pm EDT.

Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World came before his magnum opus (and top-ten entry on the Klaw 100) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and having read the latter book first, I can see HBW as a buildup to the later masterwork, where Murakami was still honing his storycraft. The voice is unmistakably his, as is the raucuously inventive plot, but it’s less cohesive than TWUBC or the similarly amazing Kafka on the Shore.

HBW tells two stories in alternating chapters, with the connection only becoming apparently at or just after the book’s midpoint. The main storyline revolves around a narrator who is a Calcutec, a person responsible for encrypting data in his brain, which has been surgically altered to allow for separate, independent access of the two halves of the cerebrum (?). He’s called in for a special, top-secret project by a mysterious hermit-like possibly-mad scientist who knows more than he lets on.

The second storyline is mysterious, as the narrator has just arrived in a strange Town where time exists but moves on forever – not in an infinite loop, where time repeats, but with neither beginning nor end, to say nothing of purpose. People in the Town have no names, no identities beyond their assigned roles, and no feelings. The Town is walled – by a Wall, of course – and there is no way out, although the narrator is never explicitly described as a prisoner and seems to be a VIP of sorts. Its nature is deliberately vague, and only becomes clear after Murakami connects the two plots.

Unfortunately, Murakami appears to have started with the idea of writing one novel and decided midstream to write a different one. In the first half of the book, it appears that the narrator is going to be sucked into an underworld battle between factions fighting over what appears to be control of critical data that he has been encrypting. He’s threatened and injured, goes on the lam … and that plot line ends there, with no return or hint of resolution, and it’s never quite clear what his assailants were after or what they decided to do in the day and a half that follows the assault.

Murakami’s easy, almost conversational style – like having a conversation with a slightly crazy person – and gift for creating memorable side characters was already in full effect in HBW, so it’s an enjoyable read, and he creates plenty of tension to propel the reader through the book. He goes off on an explanatory tangent mid-book, where he has to explain to the reader some bit of science or (in this case) mock science so that the overall plot will make sense, and it’s a jarring interruption to the flow of the story and the prose; it’s a crutch of a weak or inexperienced writer, and Murakami didn’t use it in either of the two books by him that I’d previously read.

If you haven’t read Murakami before, I’d strongly recommend The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle over HBW. Wind-Up Bird is, on its surface, the story of a man whose wife disappears under odd circumstances, sending him on a quest not just to find her, but to find himself. This type of introspective journey forms a part of the ultimate uber-plot in HBW, but it’s incomplete and not as all-consuming as Wind-Up Bird, a book that possesses your mind as the dream of a deep slumber. HWB is best for Murakami completists.

Next up: Alan Lightman’s Ghost.