End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland

Bought this book thinking I had found the Vintage edition paperback covers because that is the picture displayed only to be sent the newest paperback edition. Disappointed.

This will be the third time I am reading this book, this time on a beach vacation, so obviously a fan. Alongside is a companion book, aptly, Kafka on the shore. The juxtaposition is excellent and even the writing style seems to bounce between the two worlds. If you want great character development as irony is interwoven with the detailed mundane, this is a great introduction to Murakami.

If there was a genre here to bend, break, or quite simply shatter, this book wouldn't be so much genre-defying as it would a two-ton genre wrecking ball. Many precedents are at once acknowledged and seamlessly woven into an intricate whole; Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Jorge Borges, Robert Heinlein. Seemingly incongruent styles are melded, switched, convoluted, and turned outside backward. Not to disclose too much, but the dexterity with which Murakami flits between mirroring realities, (between chapters, no less!) is conceptually breathtaking. The imagery is so well written and imbued with so much poetic vividity, there are scenes that will resonate in your minds eye for hours after you have turned the page. In short, there is no preparing yourself for the literary trip you will take with Haruki as your mind-bending guide.

This has been the first Murakami novel I have ever read, and I must say it is by far the best novel I have read in a long time ! I don't think it is right to simply attach a label like "cyberpunk" or "sci-fi" to the book, because I feel the psychological aspects of the journey of a man towards his inner self are the main focus of the book. The sci-fi elements that Murakami uses to set up the plot to me are merely background settings. It is a well known fact to each living soul on this earth that death is inevitable, and one generally needs a lifetime to accept that. In this case, the main character is forced to complete his acceptation process within a day. While addressing the absurd question of "what would I do on my last conscious day", Murakami manages to create a cold concrete, painfully touching "radiohead"-like atmosphere in which the main character shamefully realizes the total triviality of his life.The end of the book still lingers in my head, Murakami uses a lot of references to american pop culture throughout the book, but not just for the simple reference itself. When you will have read the book you will understand his last reference to Bob Dylan's "A hard rain's a-gonna fall":Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,Where black is the color, where none is the number,And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',But I'll know my song well before I start singin',And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

As the title perhaps suggests, Murakami's new novel tells in alternating chapters two stories that soon begin to speak to one another as the reader notices details of the one appearing transmogrified in the other - except that "transmogrified" isn't the right word because both stories are so bizarre. The first concerns an agent or "calcutec" for "the System" (ostensibly the good guys, part private corporation, part government agency) whose brain has been altered to allow him to "shuffle" and "launder" data to keep it out of the hands of the nefarious "Semiotecs" - a sort of mafia intent on stealing sensitive high-tech information. The problem for Murakami's nameless calcutec is that his engineered subconscious - the black box in which his shuffling takes place - is short-circuiting (Murakami's sci-fi or cyberpunk account of this is quite elaborate), and when "meltdown" is complete, his world, his conscious self, will disappear, leaving him trapped deep within his own subconscious. It is here, at "the end of the world," that the second story occurs, a world of the narrator's own unconscious creation that takes the form of a walled town from which there is apparently no escape and in which unicorns siphon off the minds of inhabitants shorn of their shadows, both of which alterations leave them immortal but without emotion. In this apparent utopia, the narrator spends his time dreamreading -a lightning-rod or grounding activity performed by tracing the bits of mind stored in unicorn skulls as they are released by his touch in the ring of light rays - and contemplating, among many other things, the possibility and desirability of escape.As the narrator remarks upon being told his fate, "The Wizard of Oz had to be more plausible," yet plausibility is not this author's concern. Murakami, whose sensibility seems distinctly Western and whose works are awash in allusions to Western culture high and low, is an effortless postmodernist who in a recent Publishers Weekly interview cites Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan as important influences ("The End of the World" chapters recall nothing so much as Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar, with traces of A.E. Van Yogt's "The Enchanted Village," just as the parallel story recalls variously everything from Gravity's Rainbow to Get Smart). Likewise, Murakami revels simultaneously in sheer plot fabrication and technical experiment, on the one hand, and ideas, on the other. Like Vonnegut and Brautigan, Murakami's technical experiments succeed so unobtrusively that they are in danger of being missed, and his prose is similarly so readable, so seemingly simple and playfully colloquial (thanks here to Alfred Birnbaum), that it can easily be misread as flat and emotionless (witness Paul West's review in the New York Times Book Review). Yet as Murakami has explained in the above-mentioned interview, "Most Japanese novelists are addicted to the beauty of the language. I'd like to change that ... Language is a kind of tool,

This is simply the best book I have ever read! I was hooked from the first page and drawn into the world of the narrator as subtly as one is drawn into a dream. The linking of the subconscious and conscious elements of the mind are at work here, and this is what makes this book all at once so wonderful, disturbing and enlightening. It is a psychological masterpiece and lays bare the interconnectedness of all things- the people in our lives, the places, the choices we make, our dreams, desires, longings and regrets and most importantly, the often inexplicable and enigmatic relationship between our subconscious and conscious mind. The masterful way Murakami interweaves the chapters begins with a divergent simplicity and gradually progresses to a complex, synchronistic web/mandala in which all points share a beginning yet have no end.

I purchased this book on a whim - the descriptions sounded interesting enough to merit a look. Boy was I stunned by it. One of the best books I've read in a long time and probably one of the best novels I've read that's been written in the last 20 years. Beautifully written (and translated) it spoke to many different sides of me. The novel brilliantly fuses a number of different cultural genres (science fiction, mystery, film noir, fantasy, magical realism, "cyberpunk") into a mix that, amazingly, works very well. Try to imagine a collaborative effort by Garcia-Marquez, William Gibson, and Walker Percy and you almost might be able to envision what this book feels like to read. Who else but a Japanese author could make such an intriguing pop culture cocktail?Besides being a genre-bender, the premise of the book and the questions that it raises concerning the relationship between humanity and technology, the soul and the mind, and the individual and society are quite thought provoking.Did I mention that the book is very funny at times too?This is unlike any other book you'll ever read. Definitely worth checking out IMHO.