Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is in a way his foray into fantasy-type storytelling. There’s even a Lord of the Rings-style map at the start of the book!

SPOILER WARNING

The plot, well, there’s really two. One is set in a mysterious walled-off village where Unicorns roam the fields. An unnamed stranger arrives to work as a ‘dreamreader’. In the second,  a Tokyo man, some kind of data-manipulator for the government, does a job for a mysterious research scientist, which leads him into a world of espionage, intrigue and fable.

The second one will be familiar to Murakami fans. You can imagine the protagonist already, can’t you? Loner who likes jazz and old movies, very intelligent, knowledgeable, good cook. You can imagine the female characters as well, can’t you? Beautiful, sexy in a believable way, but ‘quirky’. There’s nothing wrong with that. Far from it, it’s what Murakami knows best, and what we as his fans enjoy.

What gives this novel depth and sets it apart from the Murakami novels is that first plotline, the mysterious fantasy world. It’s not until two-thirds of the way through the book that the connection between the two stories becomes clear. And even then it is accompanied by one hell of a scientific explanation (it even needs a flow diagram!). It’s an interesting, and I’m sure tried before, device. But Murakami executes it well. Both worlds are rich with the sort of everyday detail that make his prose engaging. The styles of the two worlds, one chapter of each following the other, complement each other well and stop you from getting bored.

As a science writer, I was immediately wary of the scientific content, coming from an author not normally associated with science fiction or a background in science. But Murakami represents the scientific community surprisingly well. Sure, the theory he describes is nonsense, but he picks up the language of neuroscience and psychology well and he nails the personality and drive of a researcher. And it’s interesting theory, almost plausible, even if it does hurt your head to try and understand it. How much more accurate does it get than that?

There’s a lot of interesting ideas here, which from the Wikipedia entry, seem to have been collected from his many different literary influences. From losing one’s shadow to the essence of consciousness, industrial espionage and Japanese folklore, it makes for fascinating stuff. It’s not my favourite Murakami novel, but I really enjoyed it. For me, the central theme is the point of life and what you’re looking to get out of it. The main character wrestles with issues of mortality and existence. He concludes that its the small things in life, the things that you enjoy and make you you, that are what makes life worth living. A simple, and unoriginal, point, but one always worth making.