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the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



End of the World and
Hard-Boiled Wonderland

by
Murakami Haruki


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland


Title: End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland
Author: Murakami Haruki
Genre: Novel
Written: 1985 (Eng. 2024)
Length: 446 pages
Original in: Japanese
Availability: End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland - US
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - US
End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland - UK
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - UK
End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland - Canada
La fin des temps - France
Hard-boiled Wonderland und das Ende der Welt - Deutschland
La fine del mondo e il paese delle meraviglie - Italia
El fin del mundo y un despiadado país de las maravillas - España
from: Bookshop.org (US)
  • Japanese title: 世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド
  • Translated and with an Afterword by Jay Rubin
  • Previously "Translated and adapted by Alfred Birnbaum with the participation of the author" (with significant cuts to the text), as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991)
  • With an Introduction by the author

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Our Assessment:

B : wildly inventive -- for better and worse

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
The Atlantic Monthly* . 10/1991 Phoebe-Lou Adams
The Guardian* . 26/10/2001 Isobel Montgomery
The LA Times* . 15/9/1991 Richard Eder
NZZ . 21/9/2006 Marion Löhndorf
The NY Times Book Rev.* D 15/9/1991 Paul West
Sunday Times* . 29/9/1991 Iain Grant
The Times* . 27/10/2001 Victoria Segal
The Washington Post* . 11/8/1991 Bruce Sterling
World Lit. Today* . Winter/1992 Sanroku Yoshida
Die Zeit . 27/4/2006 Hubert Winkels

(* review of Birnbaum's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World-version)

  From the Reviews:
  • "The book is rich in action, suspense, odd characters, and unexpected trifles (.....) Whatever interpretation a reader chooses to give this provocative work, it will not be found boring." - Phoebe-Lou Adams, The Atlantic Monthly

  • "Murakami uses mystery and romance to pull the reader through complicated games in style and content. His fantasies, with their easy references to western pulp fiction and music, sound shoddy when explained, but retain a beauty in the mind." - Isobel Montgomery, The Guardian

  • "Murakami’s allegory is persuasive, but the means he uses to work it out are awkward and often unconvincing. (...) The least successful parts of the book are the science-fiction trappings. The Professor and his mind-scrambling projects are expounded at tedious length; they are both abstract and murky. (...) Murakami’s gift is for ironic observations that hint at something graver. At his best, he is wry, absurd and desolate. His talent lacks the innocent energy that keeps a complicated plot moving. (...) He is better at asides and excursions." - Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times

  • "Der tragische Konflikt wandelt sich: Das Problem, wie sich das aktive Ich des «Hard-Boiled Wonderland» vor der passiven Existenz am «Ende der Welt» noch retten kann, wird abgelöst durch den Zweifel darüber, ob es sich davor überhaupt noch retten will. «Das Ende der Welt» - wunschloses Glück oder traumloses Unglück ? Das ist nicht nur in diesem Roman die Frage, die mit einer indirekten Aufforderung zur Überprüfung der eigenen Definition vom Glück auch an den Leser weitergereicht wird. Die Infragestellung konventioneller -- westlicher -- Glücksvorstellungen gehört zum festen gedanklichen Repertoire dieses Autors." - Marion Löhndorf, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

  • "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World would have been better if Mr. Murakami had been able to get more emotion into his story. (...) My objection is that Mr. Murakami's novel, wherever it calls for imaginative and inventive expansion, fobs us off with generics and categories (.....) 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 characters in the novel are cardboard cutouts, not even animated enough to find their own lives banal." - Paul West, The New York Times Book Review

  • "One of the splendid things about the book's construction is that these two elements seem to relate to each other in only the vaguest way until we find out what links them, but we are lured into reading further by Murakami's inventiveness and by the fluidity of his writing. It is a remarkable book in many ways, not least because it is one of the few translated Japanese novels that you can pick up and read without being immediately aware that it is a translation. This is partly due to the excellence of the rendering into English by Alfred Birnbaum, who has captured the crazed, surreal feel of Murakami's Japanese, as well as is possible. (...) Murakami's writing is relaxed and informal, and is already closer in feel to some modern Western, especially American, writers than to his own predecessors." - Iain Grant, Sunday Times

  • "This wonderful narrative fantasia makes you realise that Being John Malkovich might not have been such an original work after all. (...) A treat for both hemispheres of the brain." - Victoria Segal, The Times

  • "Murakami, whose bold willingness to go straight-over-the-top has always been a signal indication of his genius, flings genre cliches around like a drunken strong-man kicking beer-barrels downstairs. (...) Murakami has some grand wisecracking fun with genre kitsch, pumping energy into clunky plot-devices until they fibrillate and fly apart. But the main appeal in the book, and the likely reason why it won Murakami a major Japanese literary prize, is in the extraordinary attitude it manifests, a powerful melange of disillusioned radicalism, keen intelligence, wicked sarcasm and a general allegiance to the surreal." - Bruce Sterling, The Washington Post

  • "(T)he stories are full of suspense and adventure. Some passages (...) remind the reader of similar scenes in Steven Spielberg adventure movies. Furthermore, the novel abounds with allusions to music and literature, both modern and classical, as well as to popular culture and recent fads (...) most of which are Western. (.....) The translator of the present volume, Alfred Birnbaum, (...) has once again done an excellent job." - Sanroku Yoshida, World Literature Today

  • "Mit dem Wunderland liegt ein Herzstück der Romanwelt des Haruki Murakami vor. Von ihm aus lassen sich die anderen Romane und Erzählungen besser verstehen. Vor allem der Das Ende der Welt betitelte Romanteil bietet die gnostische Gegenwelt, die den geheimen Fluchtpunkt aller Murakami-Bücher bildet, zeigt anschaulich, wie diese aussieht: den dunklen Uhrenturm ohne Zeitangabe, die Bibliothek aus Tierschädeln, das Fell der Einhörner im Dämmerlicht und was es frisst, dieses eingebildete »Tier, das es nicht gibt« (Rilke). (...) Ist es eine Utopie, eine Warnutopie oder eine narrative Computertomografie unserer aufgeblähten Fleischlichkeit ? Doch was immer das ist, was uns an der naturtrüben Welt der Einhornschädel und ihrer verlorenen Träume fasziniert -- wir haben darin zweifellos den fantastischen Kern der vielen verlorenen und coolen Figuren Murakamis, die seine rund fünfzig Bücher prägen." - Hubert Winkels, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland is told in alternating chapters that follow the experiences of two unnamed first person narrators living in very different worlds. Both these worlds are at least somewhat of a stretch from reality-as-we-know-it -- one much more than the other -- but then, as one of the protagonists notes:

But what was reality ? The more I thought about that, the more confused I became. Reality was dull and heavy and shapeless, like sand stuffed into a big cardboard carton.
       Murakami gives us alternate-words that are, at the very least, of much more motley invention -- though, while not sand-like, a lot is certainly stuffed into something here.
       Each 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland'-chapter has a two or (more often) three-pronged chapter-heading listing some of the things that play a role in said chapter -- 'Skulls, Lauren Bacall, Library', for example, or: 'Nail Clipper, Butter Sauce, Iron Vase' -- while the 'End of the World'-chapter headings offer only a single concept at a time -- 'The Coming of Winter', for example, or 'Pit'.
       The narrator in 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland' is: "just one practically-minded, individualistic Calcutec", hired to do a job -- a special kind of calculation -- by an old man who introduces himself as a biologist ("In the broadest sense of the word") who makes clear that his: "Research is extremely valuable and creative". He works in a well-protected and hard-to-reach underground lair, with the narrator describing just how complicated getting there is, via endless elevator ride and then a long, wet journey past a waterfall (and threatening creatures that lurk nearby). The narrator is asked to perform: "a brain wash and shuffling" -- whereby 'shuffling' is a procedure that the old man shouldn't even know about ("It's top secret stuff. Outsiders are not supposed to know about it"). There is also some urgency to the task, the old man saying he needs the figures in three days' time -- but the narrator assures him: "That's plenty of time".
       The narrator in 'End of the World' writes from an isolated, walled town, accessible only via a single gate, manned by the Gatekeeper. When he arrived in town, the Gatekeeper removed his shadow -- no one in the town has one -- and, as he then finds: "All memories of my old world seem to have gone off with my shadow when it was taken from me". The Gatekeeper keeps the shadow, and the narrator occasionally visits it, but over time it weakens and will likely eventually die.
       The Gatekeeper also 'marks' the narrator (his eyes, specifically, rendering him especially sensitive to light, so that he then has to avoid bright daylight), making him a 'Dreamreader' -- the job he is assigned in the town. He is to spend his time reading dreams in the local library, which is dedicated to that one task. He is the only dreamreader, and he performs his job by 'reading' from the animal skulls stored there. (Meanwhile, the old man in 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland' is a collector of skulls, and has a large collection of them .....)
       (Murakami had played with this idea of a Dreamcatcher in such an isolated setting in an earlier story, and he revisits it in his recent The City and its Uncertain Walls, a similarly two-tracked novel, one of whose trajectories and specifics quite closely follows the 'End of the World'-storyline here.)
       In describing doing his job, the Dreamreader admits:
All that I was able to read from the skulls were a number of uncertain fragments, and, try as I might to piece those fragments together, I couldn't grasp a picture of the whole.
       The reader might feel similarly as s/he moves back and forth between these narratives, with both strands of End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland suggesting a whole but leaving many of its shape-shifting contours blurred. (The Dreamreader will also attempt to map the town he lives in, but it defies easy charting (though a drawn map is presented as part of the book).) Unsurprisingly, however, there are overlaps and commonalities between the two main characters and their stories; not least: it's an obvious leap, from fairly early on, that our two narrators are the same person.
       (As translator Jay Rubin explains in his Afterword, in the original Japanese the one narrator (in 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland') uses the "more formal and distanced" 'I' in Japanese, 私 (watashi), while the other (in 'End of the World') uses "the colloquial male first-person pronoun", 僕 (boku) -- a difference lost in English, where there is just 'I'. Rubin notes that previous translator Alfred Birnbaum distinguished the two storylines by presenting them in different tenses -- past and present -- but he opted not to take this approach. (In its clear back and forth, chapter by chapter, and their very different environments and situations, it's fairly easy to keep track of who is who (aside, of course, from the fact that they might be the same person ...).))
       The 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland'-narrator explains how he became a Calcutec, which also involved him being frozen for two weeks, during which time: "what might be called the core of my consciousness" was extracted; it was then set to his "shuffling pass drama, and then reinserted into my brain". He is told the title of that drama -- 'End of the World' (yes, as in the locale the Dreamcatcher finds himself in ...) -- but they did not reveal to him what: "the contents of my core consciousness" were.
       Meanwhile, the Dreamcatcher, in his world, is told (by the Gatekeeper):
you are not yet a fully formed human being. You still have uncertainties and contradictions and regrets and weaknesses.
       Stripped of his shadow ("the matrix of the self"), he seems less than complete already, but in this town a fully formed human being is of a different sort, and involves being stripped of more. As his shadow eventually explains to him:
     The perfection of this town is like that. Perfection is the same as perpetual motion. There's no such thing as a perfect world: it's a theoretical impossibility. But this place is perfect. Meaning there has to be a trick to it, the way a perpetual-motion machine is actually using a hidden source of power to keep spinning.
       The shadow also eventually diagnoses what the trick is (which starts, of course, with separating shadow from person), and it is the shadow which also pushes the Dreamcatcher to escape with him before it is too late. Among the enticements: "You can be your old self again" ..... In both worlds in the novel, the clock is ticking -- the old man needs the calculations in three days (with the narrator then facing an even tighter deadline), while the shadow only has so long to survive (determining also the Dreamcatcher's future). As someone asks at one point: "Then how many hours do we have left until the End of the World or the Big Bang or whatever it is ?" (There are other instances of time-pressure, as well, including a miniature 'Murk repeller', a mobile defensive device against the unpleasant Murks that lurk in the world of 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland' ("They eat only rotten flesh and garbage. They drink only putrid water. In ancient times, they lived under graveyards and ate the buried flesh of dead people -- until Japan switched to cremation"), which has to be switched off for fifteen minutes to recharge after every half-hour of use.)
       The 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland'-narrator is thirty-five and divorced, and looking forward to retiring -- "I'd take it easy studying Greek and the cello" -- but comes to learn that his situation is a more complicated one. For one, when he said he was: "just one practically-minded, individualistic Calcutec" he didn't know the half of it: twenty-five others were put through the same procedure as him, given the ability 'to do shuffling' and ... they did not do well, all dying within a year and a half. After three years, he's the only one left standing (and shuffling ...). Clearly, there is something different about him (and/or his consciousness ...).
       Quite early on, this 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland'-narrator moans: "Why should all these strange things be happening to me ? What had I done to deserve this ?" But, like many a Murakami-protagonist he goes fairly easily and readily with the (often indeed very bizarre) flow -- part of the time with a sidekick, as well, as both the old man's virginal, plump seventeen-year-old granddaughter (though the narrator insists she looks older: "To me, you've got to be over twenty" ...) as well as a very helpful librarian (who even tidies up for him, after his apartment is smashed to pieces) variously accompany him. In his world, the Dreamcatcher also has a relationship, professional as well as somewhat personal, with a (somewhat different kind of) librarian.
       (As is often noted, Murakami's depiction and use of women in his fiction is often ... discomfiting; the harping on the granddaughter's fatness -- though she is so well-rounded not just by choice but through considerable intentional effort -- probably doesn't sit too well, for example, and while the three main female figures are all 'strong' women, who display agency, it sometimes comes out ... problematically, as when the seventeen-year-old talks about learning about sex, about which she admits to knowing little, and says: "I like things to be more overwhelming. I want to be violated overwhelmingly and accept it overwhelmingly, not 'naturally' learning about 'one thing or another'".)
       There's rich invention in both strands of the novel, from unicorns (and, especially, unicorn skulls), to the nefarious organizations that have an interest in the old man and what he is working on, as well as then what the Calcutec is shifting (including also an amusing scene in which the one narrator's apartment is torn apart (without the neighbors seeming to take much notice ...)). The 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland'-narrator is often on the move, traversing Tokyo underground as much as aboveground, while the 'End of the World'-narrator also explores the smaller (yet elusive) enclave he finds himself in -- one more manifestation of how End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland is a quest-tale. Nameless, the narrators are not quite everymen, but the core-identity Murakami is after is not individual; he is -- or rather his characters are -- looking for (tapping for, almost blindly and without a clear conception of what it they're seeking, to be more accurate) greater truths.
       End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland is a novel of a particular kind of journey of self-discovery (not least because, as the 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland'-narrator maintains: "I didn't need to 'become' myself: I was myself enough already, I felt"), with a strong dose of deciding how to live -- what matters -- along the way. As the 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland'-narrator realizes:
     Even if I could live my life over again, though, I was sure I would live it in the same way, because, finally, this life of constantly losing things was me. There was no way for me to become anyone other than myself.
       The fundamental is unchangeable: we are who we are -- but Murakami plays an interesting game with his bifurcated protagonist(s) in exploring that fundamentality.
       Murakami often mentions the physical, his protagonists suffering injury, illness, and pains and describing their physical exertions -- but much else is simply in the mind, and so also at one point the 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland'-narrator, in complete darkness, feels disembodied:
     Not being able to see your own body is kind of weird. If the situation continues long enough, you start to think the body might be nothing but a hypothetical construct.
       So also the Dreamcatcher and his world -- occasionally glimpsed, in the barest snatches, in dreams and the like by the 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland'-narrator -- might merely be a part of that hidden 'core consciousness' buried in his mind -- and, with his separated shadow, is in any case no longer fully corporeal.
       The Dreamreader's assignment is also an exercise of mind over matter -- whereby his librarian tells him (who is uncertain about what he is doing and how to properly go about it) that in any case: "the question of 'meaning' has very little to do with the work itself". So also here, as is often the case in Murakami's fiction, the medium is very much part of the message. At one point the Dreamcatcher remarks in and of his world: "Everything was wrapped in an enigma", and Murakami certainly goes for a great deal of wrapping in his novel.
       Bits can feel too arbitrary -- Murakami just tossing whatever comes to mind in, it can seem -- and the explanations (to the extent we get them) of concepts such as 'shifting' and dreamreading too tortured, but Murakami keeps things moving (even if not always in what would seem the more obvious directions). The time-constraints add some suspense -- though Murakami's rather laid-back protagonists don't readily let themselves be rushed. The interplay between the two plotlines is solid, and with it also Murakami's larger ambition; it's all quite well done if a bit over-full and with some discordant notes (unsurprising, given just how much he heaps into this novel).
       Note: that this is a new and complete translation of Murakami's 1985 novel; translator Jay Rubin notes in his Afterword that Murakami told him some 100 pages of the original had been cut in the previous translation, by Alfred Birnbaum (as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991)). Certainly, a complete translation is welcome -- more (of the original) is certainly always to be preferred (at least by me) -- and while I don't have my copy of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World at hand to compare it to, I think the novel can only benefit from the fuller presentation. I do note, however, that, sampling some of the chapters online, I do rather (considerably) prefer Birnbaum's renderings to Rubin's (though I think Rubin was right to use the past tense for both strands of the novel (rather than alternating with present for the one, as Birnbaum did)).

- M.A.Orthofer, 4 December 2024

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Links:

End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland: Reviews (* review of Birnbaum's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World-version): Murakami Haruki: Other books by Murakami Haruki under review: Books about Murakami Haruki under review: Other books of interest under review:
  • See Index of Japanese literature at the complete review
  • David Mitchell's Murakamiesque Ghostwritten

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About the Author:

       Japanese author Murakami Haruki (村上春樹) was born January 12, 1949. He attended Waseda University. He has written several internationally acclaimed bestsellers and is among the best-known contemporary Japanese writers.

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© 2024 the complete review

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