Hard-Boiled Wonderland at Powell’s Books
I recently purchased the book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami as part of my participation with the Carl Brandon Society API Heritage Month reading list. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to finish it yet, but I wanted to post about what I’ve read so far and the initial impressions of the work.
Haruki Murakami is one of those writers that has been on the edge of my literary awareness some time. I was intrigued by Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and after the quake, but, for whatever reason, I never got around to getting those books. Because the opportunity to delve deeper into his work presented itself, I started reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and then also decided to read a bit more about him. I’m fond of the works of Kurt Vonnegut and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it appears that they are two writers that have influenced Murakami.
The presence of a Vonnegut-like style of storytelling is hinted at within the first few pages of this book, though Murakami undeniably has a different style and the similarities seem tenuous at best. Still, there is a surreal, out-of-body “invitation” into the story. It opens with a man stuck in a elevator and, due to its nature, he begins to question the passage of time and his own mental facilities:
“The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn’t moving at all.”
After reading the first chapter, I went back to the first page and wrote this initial impression underneath the title: ‘opening paragraph/chapter – trapped? A symbol for the mind and mindless grasping in a modern work-a-day world?’
While I’m in no way sure that this is what’s being alluded to in the first chapter, I’ve found some have said that he writes about “characters that are obsessed with capitalism.” Besides “climbing the ladder,” there might be no better symbol for capitalistic obsession than going upward in an elevator, shut off from awareness of the outside world.
At this point, I’m uncertain as to how much I will like the novel. The writing is striking, but I haven’t gleaned enough from the book yet to get a proper hold on the story it’s trying to tell. I’m up for the challenge and regardless of where it takes me, at the end of this 400 page journey I believe I’ll have much to think about. This is the great thing about getting involved with literary-minded communities—it opens the world up to a slew of works that one may have otherwise overlooked due to lack of time and information.
With roughly 200,000 books published per year, it can be easy to get sucked into a stale reading existence—sticking only to what one is familiar with and nothing else. Books aren’t always inexpensive. And for those of us that really enjoy reading and being invested in the stories we read, works that don’t “click” can be profoundly disappointing. Nevertheless, if one is to discover something breathtaking and new, to grow and learn, one has to be open to the possibility that not everything read will strike a strong cord with one’s particular tastes.
