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In a futuristic, Johnny Mnemonic-y Tokyo, a young guy works as a Calcutec, a sort of human encryption key paid to process and transport data securely within his own subconscious mind. He takes an off-the-books assignment from a cranky old engineer of Calcutec technology who lives and works in a dank underground labyrinth guarded by his pudgy granddaughter. Upon completing his work, the narrator finds himself on the business end of threats from the Semiotecs, arch-enemies of the Calcutecs bent on stealing data to use it for presumably unsavory purposes. As time passes, his mind plays more and more tricks on him, perceiving reality in unpredictable ways and repeatedly hammering him with the image of a unicorn skull, one of which the prof mailed him as an extra reward for a job well done. Researching unicorn skulls leads him to an attractive librarian who may know how to figure out why his mind's going haywire.
Simultaneously, another unnamed protagonist arrives in a walled city referred to as "the end of the world". After having his shadow removed, he's introduced to his job: reading the dreams of a bunch of unicorn skulls stored in the town's library. Chafing against his limited, routinized existence, he plans an escape from the city along with his shadow, which has been relegated to slow death by manual labor.
This is an early example of the two-narratives-converging form that Murakami would later use, to kinda-sorta-success, in Kafka on the Shore. Rather than having the main characters' paths cross, though, he sets up parallels between them — you may have noticed the unicorn skulls, for one — that hint at a more complex arrangement. Though I am not particularly respectful of the great internet spoiler code, I'm not sure how much to reveal about the extent to which the two stories, "Hard Boiled Wonderland" and "The End of the World", are intertwined. Hell, I'm not even sure how much they are intertwined. Murakami imbues his works with many qualities; easiness isn't one of them.
Occasional Murakami translator Jay Rubin wrote a book called Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, a really informative couple hundred pages about the man and his work in both Japanese and American contexts. In it, Rubin recalls his initial encounter with Murakami's peculiar aesthetic being none other than Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. He was just blown away by how different it was than the thousands of Japanese narratives he'd previously read, absolutely unencumbered by tradition or custom and audaciously non-autobiographical. "A breath of fresh air" would be the appropriate cliché. I believe the book remains Rubin's favorite Murakami, including the ones he himself translated.
I'm kind of with him and I'm kind of not. Sure, the novel is full of imaginative ideas that have stayed with me: the dreaded, only indirectly invisible "INKlings" that swarm through the sewer leading to the old professor's lair; the nature of Calcutec training and the work itself; the process of dream-reading; the (common in Murakami) permeable membrane between one reality and the other. But as studded with neat things as it is, the whole Murakami-meets-Gibson hybridization — the Johnny Mnemonic comparison runs deeper than you may assume — gets problematic. The biggest issue is that it's simply too distanced from normal human experience. Or at least from my normal human experience. The "Hard-Boiled Wonderland" half is set in a conceivable future and thus theoretically grounded in the actual present, vague as Murakami is about certain elements of it. The "End of the World" setting is pretty much cut from whole cloth. If the former is Murakami's take on sci-fi, the latter is Murakami's take on fantasy. I like Murakami. I kinda like sci-fi. But boy howdy, I do not cotton to fantasy.
This passage, from "Hard-Boiled Wonderland", made up for a lot, though:
The woman was on the chubby side. Young and beautiful and all that went with it, but chubby. Now a young, beautiful woman who is, shall we say, plump, seems a bit off. Walking behind her, I fixated on her body.
Around young, beautiful, fat women, I am generally thrown into confusion. I don't know why. Maybe it's because an image of their dietary habits naturally congeals in my mind. When I see a goodly sized woman, I have visions of her mopping up that last drop of cream sauce with bread, wolfing down that final sprig of watercress garnish from her plate. And once that hapens, it's like acid corroding metal: scenes of her eating spread through my head and I lose control.
Your plain fat woman is fine. Fat women are like clouds in the sky. They're just floating there, nothing to do with me. Bur your young, beautiful, fat woman is another story. I am demanded to assume a posture toward her. I could end up sleeping with her. That is probably where all the confusion comes in.
Which is not to say that I have anything against fat women. Confusion and replusion are two different things. I've slept with fat women before and on the whole the experience wasn't bad. If your confusion leads you in the right direction, the results can be uncommonly rewarding. But of course, things don't always take the right course. Sex is an extremely subtle undertaking, unlike going to the department store on Sunday to buy a thermos. Even among young, beautiful, fat women, there are distinctions to be made. Fleshed out one way, they'll lead you in the right direction; fleshed out another way, they'll leave you lost, trivial, confused.
In this sense, sleeping with fat women can be a challenge. There must be as many paths of human fat as there are ways of human death.
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