Been reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami this week. Finished it last night right before I went to bed. I’ve had this lying around in my book shelf for quite a while now, but haven’t gotten around to reading it before now. I’m glad I ended up picking it up, because it was fucking awesome.

The story? I’m not sure I’d be able to explain it, thank god for Amazon: The last surviving victim of an experiment that implanted the subjects’ heads with electrodes that decipher coded messages is the unnamed narrator of this excellent book by Murakami, one of Japan’s best-selling novelists and winner of the prestigious Tanizaki prize. Half the chapters are set in Tokyo, where the narrator negotiates underground worlds populated by INKlings, dodges opponents of both sides of a raging high-tech infowar, and engages in an affair with a beautiful librarian with a gargantuan appetite. In alternating chapters he tries to reunite with his mind and his shadow, from which he has been severed by the grim, dark “replacement” consciousness implanted in him by a dotty neurophysiologist. Both worlds share the unearthly theme of unicorn skulls that moan and glow.

It took me a few chapters before I got into it, but once you get used to the two partially entwining stories there’s no stopping as they unravel each other. If the other works by Murakami is anything like this, I can see myself reading a lot more by him.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 03:27 and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.