Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the WorldIn Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Murakami divides the protagonist into two characters, Boku and Watashi. In End of the World, Boku is assigned to the fantasy world of a walled town; here, at the end of the world, he serves as the reader of old dreams that are lodged within the skulls of unicorns. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland, the character Watashi is assigned to a futuristic Tokyo that is the scene of deadly conflicts between two competing information networks. Throughout the novel, the two worlds increasingly connect and, in the end, Boku and Watashi fuse into one. The parallelism is found within the length of each chapter, the characters, and the significant occurrences.
The two parts of the title reflects the double structure of the novel. Two separate narratives— one entitled Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the other The End of the World— progress in alternating chapters. “Watashi, the protagonist, is a man without emotion. Which, coupled with his brilliant work on computers, makes him the ideal candidate for an aging professor who is hiding in the sewers of Tokyo.” (Contemporary Authors, 139) While underground, surrounded by a waterfall and by the INKling creatures, he is hidden from the two competing information organizations that control everything Japan— the System and the Factory. The scientist has devised a code by operating on the brains of selected computer workers. Watashi is summoned to the scientist’s lair, presented with a unicorn’s skull, and told of a project entitled The End of the World. The problem for calcutecWatashi is his engineered subconscious. The black box in which his shuffling takes place is short-circuiting, and when the meltdown is complete, his world, and his conscious self, will disappear leaving him trapped deep within his own subconscious. In a conversation with Watashi, the Professor explains the situation.
“But the question here is that with the electrical discharge from the
meltdown, the channel’s been dealt an abnormal shock. And your
brain’s so surprised, it’s started up emergency adjustment procedures.”
“Meaning, I’ll keep producing more and more new memories?”
“‘Fraid so. Or more simply, deja vus of sorts. Don’t differ all that
much in principle. That’ll go on for a while. Till finally you
reassemble a world out of these new memories. This very moment
you’re preparin’ t’move to another world.” (Murakami, 283)
It is here, at the end of the world, that the second story occurs— the ancient walled town. In alternating chapters, Boku arrives to this home of the unicorns, is separated from his shadow, and is set to work interpreting the dreams of the skulls in the library.
Each End of the World chapter is precisely half the length of its corresponding
Hard-Boiled Wonderland chapter. To comprehend this deliberate manipulation of chapter length, one must understand Watashi’s process of laundering numeric data. Watashi describes this procedure as...
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