AbdElrahman Mostafa Mostafa থেকে S.Roque do Pico, Portugal
I *love* this book! "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" was just Murakami-weird enough for me. This is the eighth novel by Murakami that I completed, and my mind is still working through some of the themes covered in it that tease the mind--the role of individual choice in making meaningful lives, the connection between our shadow selves, our intellects, and our ability to give and receive love, and the distinction between a life of happiness and a life of fulfillment. And this list barely scratches the surface. In this novel, Murakami brilliantly alternates his narrative between two worlds--"the hard boiled wonderland," a futuristic Tokyo ruled by mad scientists and information warriors and "the end of the world," a realm of eternal peace where there is no suffering nor conflict. Those who claim that these stories constituted two separate and unconnected story lines weren't paying attention. The alternate chapters echo one another and communicate with one another from the book's beginning. The "end of the world" was the universe of the protagonist's unconscious mind, a reality that parallels the Tokyo of "the hard boiled wonderland" like a photo negative of it--light where the other is dark. In a sense, the Jungian relationship between the individual and his shadow, a necessary relationship for a life of balance, meaning, and fulfillment, is shown micro-cosmically in the individual characters in "the end of the world" universe, and we are shown the same relationship macro-cosmically in the book's alternating chapters, two worlds--one conscious, one unconscious. On a lighter note, "the chubby girl" was one of the best characters in the book, so I think she deserves more respect than she gets from the protagonist. She's treated like a joke even though she is smart, strong, honest, and tough. I also would have liked to see the librarian's character further developed (in the hard boiled wonderland chapters). While this librarian is without a mind in "the end of the world" chapters for reasons you will understand while reading the book, I don't see why she has to seem as two-dimensional as she does in the "hard boiled wonderland" chapters. It was difficult to understand the protagonist's fascination with this librarian whose only redeeming qualities seem her abilities to successfully find books about unicorns and to clean a ransacked apartment. Murakami fans like me who love the surreal, mind-bending qualities of Murakami's best fiction--"The Wind Up Bird Chronicles," "Kafka on the Shore," and "1Q84"--but found "Norwegian Wood" and some of his other more realistic novels disappointing will love this book.