Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

The title of Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is so great that this review/reflection/summary of the novel will have no other name. 

As the title suggests, there are 2 stories that slowly but deliberately coalesce, one about a hard-boiled wonderland in a semi-futuristic Tokyo (and what Tokyo wouldn’t be futuristic for a Western American?) and the other about the End of the World, creation of the main character’s consciousness, a strange world where people seem to live eternally but without mind and without shadow. 

The End of the World imagined by the main character/narrator is not unlike a voyage I once took to the end of the world: Finisterre, Spain, which for a long time was literally the end of the known world for Europeans at this most northwestern point of the Iberian Peninsula. Prior to Columbus’s sailing for the New World, one would look out from a viewpoint and could only imagine a deep dark space filled with monsters of the unknown beyond the horizon. This not knowing, this battle with the unknown, eternal, but in a way peaceful, because deliberately there is a peace in not knowing, is like Murakami’s End of the World. “There is no beyond,” the librarian at the End of the World says to our protagonist. “Did you not know? We are at the End of the World. We are here forever.” 

Our protagonist’s job at the End of the World is to read Old Dreams that come in the skulls of unicorns that the Librarian hands him ad nauseam until his job is “finished.” 

Our protagonist in the Tokyo of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland, whose consciousness is creating this End of the World, is a Calcutec who shuffles information and his shuffling password is “End of the World.” And we begin his story wandering through an infinite labyrinth of hallways—one imagines an MC Escher painting— in a skyscraper that seems to have no end and through a waterfall to the laboratory of an old Professor, who is the mad scientist responsible for rearranging our protagonist’s consciousness so that he can shuffle. In a mad experiment, Calcutecs, shufflers of information, maintain the sanctity of information, transferring it through the tubes of thought.

In his Calcutec training, our protagonist is told by the System: 

After a certain age—our calculations put it at twenty-eight years—human beings rarely experience alterations in the overall configuration of their consciousness. What is commonly referred to as self-improvement or conscious change hardly even scratches the surface. Your ‘End of the World’ core consciousness will continue to function, unaffected, until you take your last breath […] All efforts of   reason and analysis are, in a word, like trying to slice through a watermelon with sewing needles. They may leave marks on the outer rind, but the fruity pulp will remain perpetually out of reach. Hence, we separate the rind from the pulp. Of course, there are idle souls out there who seem to enjoy just nibbling away on the rind. In view of all contingencies, we must protect your password-drama, isolating it from any superficial turbulence, the tides of your outer consciousness. Suppose we were to say to you, your End of the World is inhered with such, such, and such elements. It would be like peeling away the rind of the watermelon for you. The temptation would be irresistible: you would stick your fingers into the pulp and muck it up. And in no time, the hermetic extractability of our password-drama would be forfeited. Poof! You would no longer be able to shuffle.

This whole description of shuffling and password-drama seems like a strange metaphor for being a worker bee in our current Information Age, shuffling through data on spreadsheets or in the infinite library and parallel universe unto itself, the Internet.

The mind goes when your shadow dies in the strange dimension that exists in our protagonist’s consciousness at the End of the World. When this happens, the shadow dying, the mind won’t matter, according to the Colonel who shares a room with our protagonist at the End of the World. “It will go, and with it goes all sense of loss, all sorrow. Nor will love matter. Only living will remain. Undisturbed, peaceful living.” Here is life’s great dilemma in a nutshell. We want peace but we only get peace when we are at war, struggling with life’s big ideas. It would be nice to not have a mind. Indeed, maybe peaceful. The mind is imperfect, “but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow.” But where do they lead? To oneself. “That’s what the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere.” The fear of losing oneself or one’s mind when the shadow dies elicits the question of eternality. And belief. Because “to believe something, whatever it might be, is the doing of the mind […] When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the the way of the mind.” Which puts us in a strange position. Do we choose eternality, peace, and not having a mind? Or do we choose life and all of the inherent problems it presents? 

The End of the World is a visualization, a mapping of the mind, its core consciousness. As the protagonist creates memories, he’s creating a parallel world. Professor: “The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound, painters do the same for color and shape. Mental phenomena are the stuff writers make into novels. It’s the same basic logic. Of course, as encephalodigital conversion, it doesn’t represent an accurate mappin’, but viewin’ an accurate, random succession of images didn’t much help us either.” It would be amazing to transpose our minds into a world that others can see and hear, and this is what great art does.

The idea of shuffling shows the mind as a black box. As the Professor informs us: “Even without you knowin’, you function as yourself. That’s your black box. In other words, we all carry around this great unexplored ‘elephant graveyard’ inside us. Outer space aside, this is truly humanity’s last terra incognita.” The protagonist of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland thus becomes part of an information warfare as in his shuffling he carries the Professor’s data from experiments. The Calcutecs and the Semiotecs are at war and our protagonist’s mind is the booty, but the Calcutecs and Semiotecs are two sides of the same coin. One protects information while the other steals, and they’re like the snake that is constantly biting off its tail. Not unlike the debate we have today with our information, privacy and the NSA and Wiki-Leaks and everything in between. We want privacy but we choose a form of communication that puts our lives into a strangely permanent universe, preserving it for posterity and for everybody to see, if they can just get through a few clicks of a password-drama.

The Library of Babel

The Internet, the End of the World, is this endless circle of data, not unlike Borges’s ficción “The Library of Babel.” With the great power that the Internet bestows upon us comes great responsibility and great questions: Who owns this information? Who owns information? Does it really matter? Can you really own it? The Chinese don’t seem to think that you can own Intellectual Property, and they have a really strong point there, because you can avoid the drama of having your information stolen or having your privacy infringed upon. Because, really, Who owns information? Does privacy exist? Which is why so many open source systems seem to be taking off even in the West. You can avoid the whole drama of having your information stolen by making every piece of data “open” and forgetting this whole notion of privacy, which really was a fiction anyway. The information warfare continues, though, as information is the new gold in our Gold Rush. 

What we get in Murakami’s novel is a strange, complex, but really fun theorization of the mind and a look at life in the Information Age, and is highly recommended for those who love having their minds transported to other dimensions.