It won the Tanizaki Prize in 1985 and received acclaim from The Japan Times and Publishers Weekly as well as other literary critics. Not to be read by a person that has no interest in music, classics of the cinema and mysterical nonsense. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami was originally published in Japanese in 1985 and translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum in 1991. Unicorns, jazz and rock`n`roll, sex with a librarian and no sex with a granddaughter of a scientist, strange creatures living in the underground, old dreams, a man separated from his shadow, more unicorns, an old colonel who plays chess, crackers and much more can be found in the book. Lots of stuff happens in Wonderland while nothing happens at the end of the world. On the first glance they seem to have nothing in commong - Wonderland is about a dude who works for the government in the area of untraditional cryptography while the other one tells about a man who arrives in a city that can`t be left.

It`s not that easy to tell not only because of the structure but much more because of the content. Wait, I said that there was only one novel. Every second chapter in the book comes from the first novel and every other - from the second. Finding memories, he argues, is the key to undoing the consciousness sealed off in the narrator’s mind.First thing to mention - it`s one novel and not two novels, although it may seem that they are completely different. Yet, the narrator believes that, even without his shadow, “little by little, I will recall things And as I remember, I may find the key to my own creation, and to its undoing” (399).

ETW is all symbols, theres a communion with nature and mythology, the prose style itself is even flowery, with lots of extended descriptions and emotion. The shadow says, “I got most of our memories, but what am I supposed to do with them? In order to make sense, we’d have to be put back together, which is not going to happen” (247). HBW is a gritty, urban, modern, logical world that appears realistic, cynical, with a Hemingway-like no nonsense prose style, mimicking the mathematical, reason-based side of our brain. The narrator in the end of the world is separated from his shadow, who holds their memories in the Shadow Grounds and later escapes through the Southern Pool with them. The shuffling surgery causes him to have false memories and lose some brain space that held memories. Forget the end of the world, I was ready to reclaim my whole self” (239). The hard-boiled narrator wants to get his “stolen memories back and live. Both narrators suffer from memory alteration. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World raises many questions about the relationship between memory and identity.

Hard boiled wonderland