An exceptional book I just finished reading yesterday is ‘hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world’ by Murakami. Murakami also wrote Norwegian Wood which I also loved when I read it. This book was recommended to me by my favourite Waterstones employee in Inverness.

‘Hard boiled wonderland and the End of the world’ features 2 stories that are covered in alternating chapters. One story is set on what seems to be Tokyo in 1980 (when the book was written and published) about a 35 year old man who works for some sort of futuristic corporation that has modified his brain for some commercial purposes. However in this version of the world there are various factions fighting each other and monsters too. Much of this story is set in the sewers underneath Tokyo.

The other story, which I had considerably less interest in, was set in some sort of walled town in a different reality. This reality turns out to be the unconscious of the man in the Tokyo 1980 story. This part of the book is very surreal and dream-like.

The Tokyo 1980 story starts off with our narrator in a lift and following a young female secretary through a series of corridors where she directs him into a door into sewers where he finds this mad professor type character who specifies a job the narrator has to do. They refer to various enemies out to get them when they talk: Inklings, Semiotecs etc. The professor also gives the narrator a gift, which is a skull. The narrator then returns to his apartment above ground where various characters are introduced, some out to help the narrator and some out to steal the skull and some seemingly just evil. Eventually the young female secretary contacts him again and explains the professor is missing so the narrator has to travel into the sewers again with her. They find the professor in the sewers with an injured leg and provide him with food and then the narrator and the secretary leave together. At the beginning of the book the narrator seems a bit unreliable, we don’t actually see most of the enemies he refers to (the Inklings, the Semiotecs etc) but at this point in the story he begins to talk about more and more about Western music and Western books and the reflections are a bit more mature, and I got the sense Murakami was writing about himself.

The Tokyo 1980 story is beautiful from beginning to end. When I stopped reading I felt I was touched by this beautiful piece of art. The end was especially special. The book touched something in me as Murakami is clearly a Western music fan with big classic artists such as Bob Dylan, the Beatles (Norwegian Wood his other book is named after a Beatles song). This touched something in me because my Dad and older men around me growing up always spoke highly of the artists mentioned above. The story would have been less touching if I didn’t recognise the music mentioned such as Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ Music, in the West, is in some sense like a religion among men in the modern era. And by referring to and speaking affectionately about these artists it seems Murakami and I have something in common and I’d even say I bonded with him.

The other thing that is special about this story is the narrator’s rapport with the female characters (the secretary, the librarian etc). I guess in reality his portrayal is unrealistic, in reality people put up their guard, people get irritated by small things, people are not perfect. But in this story the female characters are extremely sympathetic, smart and generally very good company.

In the end the narrator is more and more peaceful, but when I finished the book I was unclear whether the plot issues were resolved, whether the narrator would be trapped in the subconscious world or not. But the ending was so beautiful I didn’t really care.