64 pages • 2 hours read
Haruki MurakamiHard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Experience and the Self
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World raises many questions about the relationship between memory and identity. Both narrators suffer from memory alteration. The hard-boiled narrator wants to get his “stolen memories back and live. Forget the end of the world, I was ready to reclaim my whole self” (239). The shuffling surgery causes him to have false memories and lose some brain space that held memories. 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 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). 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). Finding memories, he argues, is the key to undoing the consciousness sealed off in the narrator’s mind.
Memories, as parts of the self, are not only destroyed by the shadows of the Town’s citizens dying at the end of the world but are also carried off by the beasts—unicorns—and stored in their bones. This is foreshadowed by the Professor in the hard-boiled chapters before he explains that he has seen and altered the narrator’s unconscious mind. The Professor says, “suppose you could draw out the memories stored in bones; there’d be no need for torture” (29). However, when the narrator at the end of the world reads old dreams in unicorn skulls, they are merely memories or shards of self that are broken into “indistinct fragments that never merge into a sensate picture” (185). The question raised by the deaths of the memory-carrying shadows and the remnants left behind being incomprehensible is: What is the identity of someone who has lost their memories or only has incoherent fragments of memory?
The hope of regaining lost memories at the end of the world comes from a musical memory seeping through from the hard-boiled world. Music connects different parts of the narrator’s divided consciousness. The song Danny Boy appears as early as Chapter 1, where the hard-boiled narrator whistles it (3), but he explains the memory behind it much later in the book. He tells the librarian, “I won a dozen pencils in a school harmonica contest playing this tune” (365). Despite being separated from his shadow, the song comes through to the end of the world when the narrator plays an accordion he found in front of the unicorn skulls while experiencing some sort of “love…toward the Town” (368). Memory is connected to emotion. This connection is foreshadowed by the narrator at the end of the world when he asserts that “feelings are linked to forgotten memories” (149).
Existentialism and Solipsism
Murakami also grapples with philosophical questions about the nature of existence (existentialism), and if the world is merely a creation of the mind (solipsism). The end of the world is revealed to be in the unconscious mind of the hard-boiled narrator. The narrator at the end of the world eventually learns, “[e]verything here is a part of me—the Wall and Gate and Woods and River and Pool. It is all my self” (369). This is a clear example of solipsism, where the world is contained within one’s mind. However, this is not the extent of existence. The narrator tells the Librarian that in “the mind. Nothing is ever equal. Like a river, as it flows, the course changes with the terrain” (226).
Another way of examining existence is the Professor observing and recreating core consciousnesses of Calcutecs who had the shuffling surgery. He has been “studying human consciousness for a long time” (176). The Professor compares the act of editing a visualization of someone’s core consciousness to the craft of a novelist: “Mental phenomena are the stuff writers make into novels. It’s the same basic logic” (262). The narrator is unique among the shufflers—his consciousness, that the Professor replicated in a visualization, was complete and coherent, while the other Calcutecs with the brain surgery had chaotic and incomprehensible core consciousnesses. This difference in the structures of consciousness is an exploration that falls in the category of existentialism.
A question that Murakami raises is if a life of solipsism—a life at the end of the world—is a life at all. The narrator’s separated shadow tells him:
[While the Town’s] absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope (334).
The other side of this argument is that the world of the mind is eternal. The Professor explains that “[h]umans are immortal in their thought” (285) and that the “End of the World was not death but a transposition” (341). However, the hard-boiled narrator views being trapped in the Professor’s visualization of his core consciousness as “going to die” or at least that’s how he views it “for convenience sake” (342). It is a death of his self that evolves based on experiences and interactions with other people in Tokyo.
Viewing the deadline of being trapped in the third consciousness as death forces the narrator to think about what is important in life—what he wants to do with his little remaining time. To ask what is the most important part of existence is also part of existentialism. The unnamed, hard-boiled narrator values beer, cigarettes, driving, women, and music. He fills his remaining time with simple, day-to-day pleasures, such as sleeping with the librarian and playing Bob Dylan cassettes. The sense of sound remains important even after the breakthrough of the Danny Boy song between worlds allows the narrator at the end of the world to have an existential revelation. In his final moments, the hard-boiled narrator listens to how Dylan’s voice sounds “like a kid standing at the window watching the rain” (345).
Exploration of Masculinity
The hard-boiled narrator is confronted with ideas about masculinity through his sexual relationships, or lack thereof, with women. There is a strong focus on his performance in bed. The narrator is unable to become aroused with the librarian the first time they attempt to have sex. When he puts on a record afterward, he says it is just “[m]e and my limp penis and Johnny Mathis” (94). The narrator is reminded of his less than stellar sexual performance when Junior and Big Boy destroy his apartment. He winds up with “[n]ot a door to my name. Not an erection either. Pretty soon, not even a job” (164). His ability to perform sexually is listed alongside his means of survival—employment to secure funds for housing, and the housing itself—which highlights the importance of sex to the narrator.
The narrator is able to redeem himself the second time he has a date with the librarian. They have sex three times in one night and again in the morning. He notes that his “erections had been perfect as the pyramids at Giza” (364). Again, the importance of sex to him is highlighted by the comparison of his performance with one of the seven wonders of the world.
The phallic imagery of the hard-boiled narrator’s erections is echoed in both worlds through the horned beasts: unicorns. Several of the unicorn skulls in the novel are missing their horns, including the replica skull the Professor makes for the hard-boiled narrator. The librarian tells him about a historic skull that was found in the Ukraine with a “horn still intact” with a “basal diameter approximately two centimeters” (102). The skull the Professor gives the narrator has a “depression of exactly two centimeters in diameter” (102) where the horn would have been. The missing horn correlates to the lackluster performance during the narrator and the librarian’s first date. After he learns the truth about the skull, that his mind is where the unicorn skull came from, he is able to perform sexually.
Ultimately, though, who the narrator—in both worlds—does not sleep with is just as important, if not more so, than who he does sleep with. The hard-boiled narrator feels like turning down the advances of the Professor’s teenaged granddaughter is a positive character trait. When considering the worth of his own existence, he notes that he makes a considered choice “not to sleep with [her]” (391). Similarly, the narrator at the end of the world does not sleep with his Librarian. This is not due to an age difference but because he felt like “[i]t is the Town that wants me to sleep with her. That is how they would claim my mind” (225). He wants her to regain her mind—her memories—from the skulls so she can consciously consent to having sex with him. Masculinity is related to denying sexual impulses as well as the importance of sexual performance.
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