On Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Murakami’s is a very interesting style. The alternating chapters tell two threads that seem unrelated, which then gradually entwine. The even chapters, those set in The End of the World, are told in the present tense whereas the odd chapters, in the Hardboiled Wonderland, where the story is seemingly more ‘real’ is told in the past tense. In this way Murakami cleverly distorts the sensation of what is real and what (or so it seems) is fantasy. Perhaps he is intimating that what is in the mind is always in the present and always more personal, even if it is the product of fantasy. That reality is what is in the mind, no matter how delusional and diseased. Channelling perhaps Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum. We are the product of our minds; all qualia: colour, sounds, smell, taste, are purely the artefacts of the brain. I remember that the realisation of this was both numinous and at the same time, upon reflection, alarming and claustrophobic. That everything we feel and sense is really constrained in the volume of our cranium. Our individual universe trapped in some 1200 cubic centimetre of space.

None of the characters in the book have names. The protagonist of the ‘wonderland’ is a quaint creation. At first glance a yuppie; good at his job but somewhat incurious (despite being very observant) and dull (reminiscent of Gregor Samsa), turns out to harbour a rich and eclectic personality. He reads and re-reads classics with an instinctive, unaffected appreciation and understanding of literature. Listens to good music and has many deep thoughts. 

However, his emotive side is somewhat dimmed. No emotion seems to be got, for example, when he talks about his wife leaving him. He seemed only somewhat miffed at the realisation that the professor has tampered, uninvited, with his brain, resulting in his premature doom. A man quick to forgive and curiously at ease with everything. A lack of sentimentality is at the crux of the ‘hard-boiled’ literary style. As are the duo of roughs and comical sequence leading up to the smashing up of his apartment (and collection of whiskey) and the bestowing of the token laceration. But there seems to be a lack of undertone or texture that might suggest a deeper well of emotion to his sang froid. But for all his oddities he is very likeable. His ease with strangers, to strike up a rapport almost immediately without affectation, his pride in his job, his openness about his personality and his contentment (as opposed to active happiness, which is transient; contentment is therefore a higher state of being) with himself are all qualities that points to a more or less ‘complete’ personality, but complete in a way that is too artificial and for that reason out of tune with verisimilitude. As one learns later in the book, this is indeed what he is; an incomplete man with his ‘core’ having been cleaved from the rest of his psyche, taking with it memories. Without knowing where you are from, without the memories that are the foundations of your personality, what’s left of you as a person? What is the conscious dissected from the sub-conscious and the unconscious? These are explored playfully in this novel.

In comparison, the ‘I’ in the end of the world is much more introspective and uncertain. He hesitates and ponders. He broods about his feelings but can’t quite grasp what they are or mean. He is therefore much more ‘real’ in the sense of being human despite inhabiting a fantasy world. Is it the part of his mind that was altered during the experiment? That which allows him to perform his dual-core shuffling? Is it the complete apartheid of his reasoning and imaginative halves? When the imaginative is unleashed without the logical and reasoning to keep it in check, cannot what appears be utterly strange yet real? Like the man whose artistic instinct was unleashed in a torrential fashion after brain injury caused by stroke; the creative urge was exigent and imperative, leading him to cover every available space on the walls, roofs and floors of his house with frescoes, only for him to paint over them once he has run out of space. Some suggest that it may be linked with the manic phase of bi-polar disorder; an unstoppable tide of creativity.

But the end of the world is walled. It is obviously not the full fledged product of an imagination let loose. No one leaves the perfect village. Pointless jobs are done there for no other reason than being a job, but people are nice and everyone has a role to fulfil. That comfortable sense of belonging robs people of their ‘mind’. To relinquish desire and curiosity and to conform seems to be the objective of the village. Is this his core? Does this hint at his real desire? Or our basic desire as human beings? Our need for security, companionship, belonging, love (of a kind) and a sense of purpose (even though it may be without aims?). It does seem to vibrate more to an Asian mindset, where the collective is placed higher in the echelon than in the Western outlook. The inner desire to belong vibrates more strongly with the Oriental temperament, as opposed to the cult of the individual which arose in the latter half of the twentieth century in Western cultures.

Curious though how superficial this culture of individualism seems. Much attention is placed on outward appearance; leading generations of people copying the hairstyles and clothing of idols and pop-stars, whose contribution to society, far from making good music in most cases, seems to be keeping couturiers and journalists in business and grooming styles which Oscar Wilde presciently perceived as ‘a form of ugliness so intolerable that it has to be changed every six months’. The somewhat absurdly named English Defence League arose partly because of this; that young people cast away what is precious and special of their culture for what is easy and apparently a display of individualism without realising the obvious and ludicrous fact that this so called individualism comes pre-packaged and is shallow as a tea-cup. European culture seems to be in decline in general. Partly because the fresh scars and horrors of WWII, following so closely on the heels of WWI (the sadly and ironically named ‘war to end all wars’) are etched deep in the psyche, leading people to be uncertain about the moral position of their nations and therefore unable to be proud or assert their culture, or worse, to fall prey to the new ‘Left’ mentality of anti-establishment, anti-government, anti-‘imperialism’, anti-West mentality that plays a dangerous game of cultural relativism guised as multiculturalism. Thinking that this is a form of radicalism whilst not realising this is the worst form of mainstream (the ‘herd of individual minds’) with an easy appeal to moral superiority without doing the hard work. Or just too lazy to care about things like history, literature, art and philosophy. But I digress.

The shadow is his link to the rest of his consciousness, the one chain that threatens to tear him away from the fictional world to which he is becoming more and more attached. The shadow may represent the remnant of his sanity, which I’ll discuss later. In the end, he chose his creation over the real world, an analogy, perhaps, of the segregation and loneliness of modern life. To retreat to your own ideal world where everything is as one would want and all one’s needs are met. We have all, I’m sure, indulged in that pleasurable fantasy in moments of hurt and weakness. Fiction appeals to us for this very reason. 

Shopenhauer’s thoughts on the aesthetic is just this; that it allows us to escape the pain of living; that instead of being conscious of one’s individuality as a perceiver in a world and thus isolated from it, art allows us to merge or immerse in the perceived and thus to realise the true nature or essence of the world. Music, which is often mentioned in the story, was viewed by Shopenhauer among other philosophers as the purest form of art because instead of copying or imitation of ideas like painting or writing, it is the idea itself. In other words, it triggers emotions without going through the filter of cognition. Perhaps the character in the Hardboiled Wonderland likes music because it somehow stirs his emotional self, now isolated from his logical half. The waking to the real world can be painful. If too painful, one might easily imagine choosing not to awake. Suicidal tendencies are built on the inability to confront the painful reality. Were one offered the choice, would not many choose to remain in such a world? (I deliberately refrain from making a reference to the Matrix) Much of Plato’s philosophy is the search for the so called ‘intelligible world’ that transcends the world of the senses which we perceive, that he describe as but the shadow of the real thing. Therefore the ultimate aim in life is to achieve transcendence (noesis I believe he termed it) in order to perceive the perfect world. It even perhaps more closely mirror the Monist school of philosophy, in particular, idealistic monism, which holds that only one thing is real and that thing is consciousness because, as Anaxagoras says ‘all things are created in the mind’.

The story can also perhaps be read as a study of someone with some type of derealisation syndrome like dissociative disorder. In an attempt to protect oneself from psychological harm, a person might disassociate or break down memory, personality and identity and even perception. The symptoms include (but are not exclusively):

Depersonalization disorder: where one feels the surrounding as unreal.

Dissociative amnesia: impairment of recall due to emotional trauma.

Dissociative fugue: confusion about identity.

Dissociative identity disorder: multiple personalities.

All these things are somewhat reflected in the character in the Hardboiled Wonderland. As this can be caused by emotional trauma, it may be a sort of response to existentialistic crisis, an internal examination of the mind of someone who has dissected his emotional self from his rational self in an attempt of self-defence; perhaps triggered by his wife’s leaving? An event that he is suspiciously impassive and terse about? If we make that assumption, that he has entered into an abnormal state of mind due to some extremely painful emotional event, where dissociation has occurred, the story then takes on another type of significance. Therefore, the shadow in the End of the World may represent the remnant of his sanity, trying with ineffectual efforts to reconnect him with reality, becoming weaker and weaker as he sinks deeper and deeper into his fantasy, where he finds companionship, order, love and a sense of belonging. The deaths of the beasts may well represent the dying of the link between the two worlds, the reading of the dreams pure emotional experience of his life in the real world; a form of catharsis that allows him to expunge the hurt that created the segregation of his mind. However, this is simply speculation.

Lastly, the title: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Why is the ‘real’ world the wonderland? Is this also a nod to the Platonic ideal? That what we think is real is really illusory and transient? Or is it perhaps an appreciation of the wonders of modernity, science and technology? Which would tie in nicely with the cyber-punk element of the novel. And the End of the World, perhaps suggesting that the inner world is where we all retreat at the inevitable? The end of the line; with our memories and our mind for company for the final furlong. I seem to remember that the Japanese title is ‘the end of the world and the hard-boiled wonderland’. I wonder why it was switched around. Since the first chapter is in the hard-boiled wonderland, why did Murakami place the end of the world first in the title? It is to emphasise the internal? The clash between the psyche and the external world? One can ponder ad infinitum about these points and derive whole pages of ideas. Perhaps Mr. Murakami didn’t intend half of them, or perhaps he intended more. But then again, that’s the beauty of art, to allow personal meaning to be derived by each and every one of its viewers. It is able to elevate the mundane to the beautiful. Like Blake’s poem:

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And beauty in a wild flower.

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

P.S. 

Two poems just occurred to me that perhaps are appropriate. Firstly, an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men:

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Perhaps the end of the world is neither reality nor the ‘idea’ but merely the shadow. Which will ‘end not in a bang, but a whimper’.

Secondly, Zhuangzi’s Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly:

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly,

A butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi.

Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi.

But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.

Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

Substitute Zhuangzi and butterfly for the two worlds and it seems almost alarmingly pertinent. Zhuangzi is very influential in Zen philosophy, so Murakami might have taken inspiration from here.