It was a dreamlike and surreal departure from the hardcore SF we’ve been reading. One just requires a lot of money, while the other requires experience and a philosophy. Oh, and before I forget, we loved the part where the narrator points out the difference between buying a fancy car and buying sofas that match a room. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator gets fairly philosophical, which lead us to ask a question as a group: What would you do if you knew you had 48 hours left to live? Answers varied, especially when talking about if we would tell someone or not. We talked about what the shadows “mean.” One reader said they symbolize the awareness of what reality is, thus a severance from them throws one into a “non-real” world.įinally, we talked about fairness and the battle within ourselves of what it means for something to be fair, and what our expectations are of fairness in life. One reader brought up the Jungian implications of this.

We also talked about the severing from shadows that occurs in the novel. It really got into the minds of the readers. Murakami has a way of making the mundane enchanting.

The scene with the protagonist on the elevator (which spans quite a few pages) really hooked the group! And they were surprised by this. We started where else, but at the beginning. “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” owes much to American”hard-boiled” detective fiction, as well as to science fiction and cyberpunk, but the book does not belong in any of those categories. Miscellaneous: Murakami has often referred to his love of Western literature and particular admiration for hard-boiled pioneer Raymond Chandler. Tracking one man’s descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.’ Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami’s international following.

Plot : ‘A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Title : Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World This was the last book we discussed in person before the COVID-19 pandemic shut things down.

Haruki murakami wonderland