The guy has a thing for Librarians. Both his original self as the Calcutech and the imagined self as the Dreamreader. *The chubby girl (grandfather's daughter) in the perceived world means nothing to him as he only fucks the librarian and consciously chooses not to fuck the chubby girl. In the physical sense the guy is a Calcutech whose job is security encryption (shuffling and laundering data). The imagined self consists of the Dreamreader and his shadow (the mind). Both the imagined and perceived worlds overlap near the end of the book, with our protaganist being confronted with a decision. Does the Dreamreader follow his shadow into the whirlpool or does he stay? He consciously chooses to stay and as a result the imagined world envelops the perceived world. So he ends up co-existing in two separate realities at the same time. Was the decision really his to make? The professor says in the real world you have 36 hours before your brain circuit switches to that inner mind. So in a sense the book ends with our guy much like the 26 other Calcutechs before him, dead. What does this have to do with the acoustic technology that the professor has in his hands? That the Semiotechs, Calcutechs, Inklings and the System are fighting over. Absoultely nothing. The book is about one man trying to regain control over his own mind and in a sense he does find that acceptance as he gives into the imagined reality. Death is explained mathematically. Xenos paradox of time being invoked. You will live in a peperpetual state of existing and not existing. Your time of death will never come as time is cut into smaller and smaller pieces. Since this is not realistically true, both the calcutech and dreamreader die as one cannot exist without the other.
Bravo! Great analysis! Thanks for taking time to share these illuminating thoughts. I especially like the superimposition of Zeno's paradox of mathematical infinity (timelines can be halved infinitely). Input like yours helps readers get more out of books. Please come back any time!
A bit late to the video, but I just read the book and definitely struggled with the same extended "fluff" narratives. I know this is an iconic characteristic of Murakami's writing and while they do get a bit boring, I can appreciate them for the meditative, sensory-immersing effect they have. In the context of this book, though, I wonder if these super in-depth descriptions of moments take on a new function that aligns with the theme of eternity; Murakami defines eternity not by "living forever", but rather by the precision or level of detail to which you experience a moment. By fully immersing us in these seemingly-irrelevant moments, is Murakami bringing us into a moment of his version of eternity? Allowing us to experience every level and detail of a moment? I felt this especially in one of the very peaceful and drawn-out last scenes, the night before the Calcutech's "departure" that he spends with the Librarian.
Out of curiosity, how old were you 18 years ago? You certainly do not have to answer as I realize this is personal data. I have heard from many people who read this long ago in their life that they loved this one. Makes me feel late to the party. :-\
If we think of the End of the World as a created world by the protagonist, in which he ultimately finds some kind of immortality, could the whole novel be interpreted as a metaphor for the writer's (subconscious) intention to achieve immortality through his work (his creation)?! Just a maybe naive thought! And also, while reading this novel, I had the thought, it could be made into a movie, in which one of the worlds would be filmed as a normal movie and the other would be represented as animation; I was a bit undecided which one would be which. Any thoughts?
I think it’s a good thought. In a sense every work of art is about the artist achieving a sort of immortality by following Hippocrates’ aphorism “vita brevis, ars longa.” Your movie idea sounds pretty intriguing. I’m not very visionary when it comes to film (don’t watch enough of them). Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
как жаль, что никто не снял кино по этому роману. и что автор канала после "Кафка на пояже" больше не читал Мураками😢 на Ютуб так мало об этом авторе. на русском языке совсем почти ничего.
Man, you made me want to go and read it again, it's been a while. There's no one better at choreographing characters, moving them around into the arrangements in space he wants, than Franz Kafka.
If I've made someone want to go and read--my job is done! Thanks for the comment. I haven't spent time with the immortal Kafka in some time. "The Hunger Artist" still haunts me daily. Seems I've got some reading to do myself.
@@LeafbyLeaf I tend not to reread novels as there's too many new titles (to me) to get to. This year I'd set myself the target of rereading Burroughs' "The Last Words Of Dutch Schultz" but now I will have to add this to the list. two is about my limit of rereads and seems I've hit that already.
@@MarcNash @paperbird is like that, too; he tends not to re-read because he likes to discover new voices. I do a mix of both, but I am a big advocate of re-reading books that consume and elude you but hint at something paradigmatic.
When it comes to characters without proper names it is probably in refernce to Kafka where the main character is mostly called K and places are never named.
Bingo. I was a bit late catching on to the allusion, despite HM having a book called Kafka on the Shore! Anna Kavan does the same thing in her early short fiction.
Little Big is incredible. It just randomly pops into my thoughts at times. As far as Hard-Bpiled Wonderland, I think people who really enjoy his work the same way Murakami enjoys writing them is as much as a right place, right time thing (as you said) but also those parts in his book where he describes things his generation would have understood more. When he describes scenes on his book I can't help but feeling like people who enjoy his taste in music, literature, and movies will really find a way to connect with the themes in his book that I think in large part are owed to that. As for me, while I find Bob Dylan's music good, I don't get the same catharsis as he probably did when writing the last chapters. I did love the Danny Boy sex scene though and it made me laugh.
Enjoyed the review! Definitely agree about all the padding that he does. Interesting thought that it could be intentional as a sort of lulling technique. Not sure if that's the case with him, but I really enjoy books that do that, bringing you to tears with boredom, and yet. 😁
I agree, though a book I can think of that backfired on that technique was THE DAY ON FIRE by James Ramsey Ullman. I was so excited about this novelistic account of Rimbaud's enigmatic life, but Ullman front-loaded it with all the interesting stuff and then wrote 400 plodding pages of conjectural wanderings with no apotheosis or anything. Yet Annie Dillard said she savored it as a young writer. Go figure.
@@LeafbyLeaf haven't heard of that one but a work on Rimbaud's life sounds appealing. yeah, not so great to bust a load upfront, but a steady edging where even if there's no pay off, could still be memorable, for the quality of the technique. i get that with Claude Simon's later works, it's tough to "pull off" tho. might be an interesting series to explore -- "boring" but in the best way!
I think the reason that Murakami dilly dallys around with a lot of description is because he wants to invite you into the sensory filled world of the main character and how painful it is for him to leave his world behind with no choice. As even though it was a very minimalistic life, he did take pleasure in the small things of life. It was his definition of feeling alive. I did grow tired of it initially and skimmed through but then had the great idea of listening to some smooth jazz and reading these descriptions of foods and places and it just made it orgasmic imo.
I’m not sure I agree that it is /painful/ for the main character-he seems pretty laissez-faire to me. But I can definitely see that interplay with jazz and the “comping” (to use a jazz term) on narration. Somewhat akin to Kerouac’s prose based on bebop and jazz. That’s a good point. Thanks for taking a moment to add to the discussion!
Lol, Thomas Nagel was a professor of mine at NYU ... and I've read tons of Dennet ... and I still found this novel completely captivating, in part b/c it conveys powerful concepts while still being totally digestible. That takes an incredible amount of nuance. Re: unicorns ... I think it is a false analogy to compare this to a fantasy where creatures interact with humans in the literal real world. It was pretty clear from the outset that that wasn't what was going on here. And the extended "point A to point B" passages are nothing compared to Lord of the Rings!
I’ve definitely come to a (late) realization that HM makes his own rules, thereby pretty much preemptively flaunting any attempt at analogy. Haha! Yep writers I have read that take complex ideas and make them artistic and digestible are Blake Crouch (Dark Matter) and the short stories of Ted Chiang.
@@LeafbyLeaf That's for sure! And partly why I love his books. I actually got Ted Chiang's latest book the other day and I'll be reading it soon, really stoked to check it out. I tried Crouch's other book .. Recursion ... and wasn't that into it but I've heard Dark Matter is way better so I've been wanting to give that a shot at some point. Also, to be fair, I was "practicing my speed reading" when I read Recursion, lol ...
I came here after watching your review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, wondering what you would have to say about this book in comparison. Hard-Boiled is my favorite of the four Murakami novels I have read so far, and the others since have consistently frustrated me. I'm interested when you say that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle seems like the book he had been trying to write, because I had the exact opposite thought. I felt like he already did it more directly in Hard-Boiled Wonderland-though it was perhaps less complex and interpersonal, more isolated and lone, noir, ...hard-boiled. Might not reflect well on my tastes. I wanted to also to comment on your observation of the amount of space Murakami dedicates to scenes of walking / transition from one place to another, which I'd never noticed before, and am happy to think about now. I would pair it up with your concept of all the eating and drinking as "keeping the character pinned to reality" (an analysis which I love), as activities which structure our everyday lives in a repetitive but necessary and very corporeal way. There are, for example, entire forms of meditation built around the activity of just walking. I wouldn't try to argue that Murakami is doing some kind of mindfulness practice by repeatedly discussing these things, since there is often an obvious component of daydreaming or projecting, thinking about others' lives, or for example the fantasy of women who can eat a ton(? okay Haruki). However, especially wrt walking, there might be, at the very least, some kind of underlying difference of cultural perspective on things that a western reader might view as interstitial or non-stuff. And I hate invoking East/West comparisons so superficially, I think it's overused, but it is what it is. Different people see things as "something [worth acknowledging]" or "nothing [i.e. not worth x]" in very different ways, indeed the idea of being "somebody" or being "a nobody" are very culturally and spiritually convoluted, can be subverted, destroyed, exaggerated, etc. So when Murakami's "average Joe" guy is just walking around idly thinking about something totally boring, a nobody doing nothing... there's something going on there. I can't finish this thought. When I first read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, all the scenes of walking distances with his gut injury (after the torture scene) were so viscerally unpleasant to me, it was like an endurance trial. I literally had my own injury in roughly the same area at the time, and I was trying not to think about it, and I have a little bit of a phobic aversion to things like surgery or wounds of that nature. I was also commuting by the utterly jam-packed subway system, which sucked, but added to the parallel experience of traveling underground. It just made me think about the experience of moving around in daily life as a matter of enduring suffering, in a mundane way, and I sort of enjoyed it (despite that it was psychically painful for me). Today, on the other hand, I'll read like ten pages of Murakami's narrator talking about a car dealership or something, and the whole time I'm impatiently screaming inside. So, clearly, I learned nothing. In defense of unicorns: those unicorns were pretty weird. Despite never before thinking about unicorns for longer than five seconds in my life, I was super into them. It's been several years since I read the book, but if I recall correctly, we're first introduced to them by seeing one of their strange skulls, and the skull is later used for some kind of scrying. Inside the Town, the unicorns are like domesticated herd animals, they're kind of wooly(? I could be misremembering this) and a lot of them die in the winter, which is not very magical of them. It's worth noting also (and I'm again going to invoke some dubious East/West thing, sorry) that mythical horned beasts exist in various forms across all kinds of disparate cultural traditions across history (mythical beasts, I might add, often intuited based on the discovery of strange skulls of extinct animals), and the one from East Asia that has been conflated with unicorns in recent times is the Qilin/Kirin. Even in Europe, unicorns have a very strange history; look up the "Unicorn tapestries" (or if you're near New York City, you could someday go see them at the Cloisters) and you'll find a story with a lot of bloodshed, captivity, inscrutable feudal stuff... I don't know if Murakami was in fact plainly thinking about European unicorns, or to what degree his picture of them is inflected with the Kirin, or if it was a translation thing, or if he cares, or what, but all I'm trying to say is he didn't seem to be picturing anything like the 1980s kitsch, Lisa-Frank-lookin', gleaming, angelic, blonde-maned, love-powered, valiant unicorn that has settled into a certain place in the collective imagination of recent times. I really love his willingness to mess-around with something so timelessly captivating yet sorta corny as a mythical beast, esp. in a way that resists the somewhat stagnant normal view of said creature. ALSO: It might even be a beer reference! I can't remember if they drink Kirin Ichiban in the book. Sorry, this is *way* more than I expected to write about unicorns when I started commenting. Anyway, these videos are great. You've got me thinking about so much stuff I had forgotten or never connected up between books. I've been meaning to re-read this one, and I might come back here to update/contradict myself.
I want to come back and more fully comment, but I wanted to quickly thank you for this well-thought-out reply and for exemplifying how to disagree and counter constructively. Talk to you soon!
I saw the unicorn more as a deer like unicorn, as in a uni-antler. Due to the part with the russian whom found it referring to siberian unicorns. And in the end of the world they have a golden wooly fur. But now Im wondering why golden.
I must say, I don’t really agree with your opinion on extended narratives. I think the descriptions Murakami uses, even though they can be long for some, are made so well as to immerse yourself into the world. I personally like to take in these informations, sip in the atmosphere he is describing and becoming part of the scenery. It has become one of my favourite novel alongside Norwegian Woods, which means a lot because it has been my favourite for a long time, but THIS. WoW, what a journey. The End of the World city is so amazingly described with the atmosphere, especially the winter, so well described you can feel it. The concept itself is so interesting and damn that ending made me shed a tear not gonna lie. Great read really, I think it’s in fact underrated as I hadn’t heard about it until I dove deeper into his works. We hear a lot about Kafka, Norwegian Woods and 1Q84, but not much about this one as well as The Wind up Bird Chronicle (Which I also loved)
Glad you connected with this one on such a deep level! Your point about immersion in the atmosphere/world is completely accurate, and I often find this connection with other writers. For whatever reason, I couldn’t connect with this one. Perhaps one day I’ll give it another go. Thanks for your input. All my best to you!
@@LeafbyLeaf Well there’s a reason why there are so many books in this world after all ! We all react differently to the same things and it’s normal ! Have a great day ☺️☺️
Very well put! There are so many factors that go into our reaction to a book at any given time. And there have been plenty of books that I’ve disliked but then revisited and loved!
@@LeafbyLeaf Indeed I have also experienced that ! It’s very interesting how our interest in something really depends on where we are at in our lives, as well as many other factors like you said so yourself
Thanks for the review very interesting. I’d really love to see your thoughts on the philosophies of the mind genre that you mentioned. The Essays The minds eye, and Thomas Chang etc. Maybe a separate video explaining them and recommended reading on the subject. Thanks
That would be a good video--thanks for the eye-dea! A few books I recommend: The Mind's I by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett (it's a collection of relevant essays) The Feeling of What It's Like by Antonio Damasio From Back to Bacteria and Back by Daniel Dennett The Mystery of Consciousness by John Searle I recommend both of the story collections of Ted Chiang.
Nice analysis. I felt like it had similarities in style and theme to Philip K Dick, Kafka’s The Trial and Castle and David Lynch (Mullholland Drive). Also Joseph Campbell and Jung with respect to dreams and metaphor. Joseph Campbell talks about the hero’s journey often going down through water, the belly of a whale, (or, in this case, a subterranean network of sewers or the lake outside the Wall of the town) to come out with a new self realization and changed in myth and in dreams. Del Torro was influenced by Campbell and Jung when creating his art like Pan’s Labyrinth. The Semiotecs are pretty directly alludes to the field of semiotics and signs, symbols, etc in art. The conscious/subconscious dichotomy plays throughout. For me he is Lynchian and the Naomi Watts character in Mullholland Drive lives simultaneously in a fantasy and nightmare world and in fact the real world is where she’s a failed actress and junkie at the end of the movie, but the story she tells herself is her alter ego at the start of the movie. Lynch is influenced by Jung and dreams. In Hard-Boiled, your comment about the dragging narrative taking many pages to move place to place to me just emphasizes the dream nature or nightmare of trying to accomplish something or get somewhere but time slows down and makes it seem like a slow process, just like dreams. So much to this book. I loved it, but it took three attempts to read it but now I really enjoyed it
I believe it is imperative that one verifies the publication date of a book before providing a review (the novel was first published in Japan in 1985 and later translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum in 1991). In addition, when critiquing a literary work, it is crucial to consider the historical context in which it was written. It is unacceptable to claim that a book is difficult to criticise due to other works consumed subsequently. This approach is akin to belittling Monet's work while praising Warhol's.
It’s been quite a while since I did this video, so I can’t remember exactly what I said or what I might have meant by this but-yikes! I’ll submit this to our Department of Blunders straight away! 🙏
Recently finished this book and have reviewed it on my channel Maha's Musings. Im a big admirer of Murakami's but I can see other aspects to it that were hmmm
This sounds like the most interesting Murakami so far in your journey, which isn't saying much, but still. I think Roberto Arlt owns the trademark for characters without proper names, by the way. Anyway, great video as always!
Thanks, George! This one definitely has its merits. Murakami is more confident (i.e. willing to take risks) here. I’ll have to check out Roberto Arlt-sounds vaguely familiar but I know I’ve not read any of his work.
I think the Calcutec and DreamReader live in two separate world. The shadow join with Calcutec in Real world (mind and body become one) in Consciousness 2 and The DreamReader live in End of The World without mind. Yaps that's my theory. But you can say that the Calcutec is dead.
The guy has a thing for Librarians. Both his original self as the Calcutech and the imagined self as the Dreamreader. *The chubby girl (grandfather's daughter) in the perceived world means nothing to him as he only fucks the librarian and consciously chooses not to fuck the chubby girl.
In the physical sense the guy is a Calcutech whose job is security encryption (shuffling and laundering data). The imagined self consists of the Dreamreader and his shadow (the mind).
Both the imagined and perceived worlds overlap near the end of the book, with our protaganist being confronted with a decision. Does the Dreamreader follow his shadow into the whirlpool or does he stay? He consciously chooses to stay and as a result the imagined world envelops the perceived world. So he ends up co-existing in two separate realities at the same time.
Was the decision really his to make? The professor says in the real world you have 36 hours before your brain circuit switches to that inner mind. So in a sense the book ends with our guy much like the 26 other Calcutechs before him, dead.
What does this have to do with the acoustic technology that the professor has in his hands? That the Semiotechs, Calcutechs, Inklings and the System are fighting over. Absoultely nothing. The book is about one man trying to regain control over his own mind and in a sense he does find that acceptance as he gives into the imagined reality.
Death is explained mathematically. Xenos paradox of time being invoked. You will live in a peperpetual state of existing and not existing. Your time of death will never come as time is cut into smaller and smaller pieces. Since this is not realistically true, both the calcutech and dreamreader die as one cannot exist without the other.
Bravo! Great analysis! Thanks for taking time to share these illuminating thoughts. I especially like the superimposition of Zeno's paradox of mathematical infinity (timelines can be halved infinitely). Input like yours helps readers get more out of books. Please come back any time!
A bit late to the video, but I just read the book and definitely struggled with the same extended "fluff" narratives. I know this is an iconic characteristic of Murakami's writing and while they do get a bit boring, I can appreciate them for the meditative, sensory-immersing effect they have. In the context of this book, though, I wonder if these super in-depth descriptions of moments take on a new function that aligns with the theme of eternity; Murakami defines eternity not by "living forever", but rather by the precision or level of detail to which you experience a moment. By fully immersing us in these seemingly-irrelevant moments, is Murakami bringing us into a moment of his version of eternity? Allowing us to experience every level and detail of a moment? I felt this especially in one of the very peaceful and drawn-out last scenes, the night before the Calcutech's "departure" that he spends with the Librarian.
I really like this thought! Reminds me of some of the tenets of the nouveau roman movement. Thanks for this!
It's my favorit Murakami book. I read it first 18 years ago... :)
I don't understand how people can't like it but everyone has a different taste...
Out of curiosity, how old were you 18 years ago? You certainly do not have to answer as I realize this is personal data.
I have heard from many people who read this long ago in their life that they loved this one. Makes me feel late to the party. :-\
@@LeafbyLeaf i am 33, i was 15! ;)
Niiiiiice!
I’m 33 going on 34 and i read this book about 5 years ago and it was amazing then and amazing now
и мой любимый роман❤ жаль, что трудно найти единомышленников😢
If we think of the End of the World as a created world by the protagonist, in which he ultimately finds some kind of immortality, could the whole novel be interpreted as a metaphor for the writer's (subconscious) intention to achieve immortality through his work (his creation)?! Just a maybe naive thought! And also, while reading this novel, I had the thought, it could be made into a movie, in which one of the worlds would be filmed as a normal movie and the other would be represented as animation; I was a bit undecided which one would be which. Any thoughts?
I think it’s a good thought. In a sense every work of art is about the artist achieving a sort of immortality by following Hippocrates’ aphorism “vita brevis, ars longa.” Your movie idea sounds pretty intriguing. I’m not very visionary when it comes to film (don’t watch enough of them). Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
как жаль, что никто не снял кино по этому роману. и что автор канала после "Кафка на пояже" больше не читал Мураками😢 на Ютуб так мало об этом авторе. на русском языке совсем почти ничего.
Man, you made me want to go and read it again, it's been a while. There's no one better at choreographing characters, moving them around into the arrangements in space he wants, than Franz Kafka.
If I've made someone want to go and read--my job is done! Thanks for the comment. I haven't spent time with the immortal Kafka in some time. "The Hunger Artist" still haunts me daily. Seems I've got some reading to do myself.
@@LeafbyLeaf I tend not to reread novels as there's too many new titles (to me) to get to. This year I'd set myself the target of rereading Burroughs' "The Last Words Of Dutch Schultz" but now I will have to add this to the list. two is about my limit of rereads and seems I've hit that already.
@@MarcNash @paperbird is like that, too; he tends not to re-read because he likes to discover new voices. I do a mix of both, but I am a big advocate of re-reading books that consume and elude you but hint at something paradigmatic.
The book was originally published in Japanese in 1985
When it comes to characters without proper names it is probably in refernce to Kafka where the main character is mostly called K and places are never named.
Bingo. I was a bit late catching on to the allusion, despite HM having a book called Kafka on the Shore! Anna Kavan does the same thing in her early short fiction.
Little Big is incredible. It just randomly pops into my thoughts at times. As far as Hard-Bpiled Wonderland, I think people who really enjoy his work the same way Murakami enjoys writing them is as much as a right place, right time thing (as you said) but also those parts in his book where he describes things his generation would have understood more. When he describes scenes on his book I can't help but feeling like people who enjoy his taste in music, literature, and movies will really find a way to connect with the themes in his book that I think in large part are owed to that. As for me, while I find Bob Dylan's music good, I don't get the same catharsis as he probably did when writing the last chapters. I did love the Danny Boy sex scene though and it made me laugh.
Enjoyed the review! Definitely agree about all the padding that he does. Interesting thought that it could be intentional as a sort of lulling technique. Not sure if that's the case with him, but I really enjoy books that do that, bringing you to tears with boredom, and yet. 😁
I agree, though a book I can think of that backfired on that technique was THE DAY ON FIRE by James Ramsey Ullman. I was so excited about this novelistic account of Rimbaud's enigmatic life, but Ullman front-loaded it with all the interesting stuff and then wrote 400 plodding pages of conjectural wanderings with no apotheosis or anything. Yet Annie Dillard said she savored it as a young writer. Go figure.
@@LeafbyLeaf haven't heard of that one but a work on Rimbaud's life sounds appealing. yeah, not so great to bust a load upfront, but a steady edging where even if there's no pay off, could still be memorable, for the quality of the technique. i get that with Claude Simon's later works, it's tough to "pull off" tho. might be an interesting series to explore -- "boring" but in the best way!
LOL! I highly recommend the first 200pp of the Rimbaud-based novel. And thank you for your signature Freudianisms!
I think the reason that Murakami dilly dallys around with a lot of description is because he wants to invite you into the sensory filled world of the main character and how painful it is for him to leave his world behind with no choice. As even though it was a very minimalistic life, he did take pleasure in the small things of life. It was his definition of feeling alive. I did grow tired of it initially and skimmed through but then had the great idea of listening to some smooth jazz and reading these descriptions of foods and places and it just made it orgasmic imo.
I’m not sure I agree that it is /painful/ for the main character-he seems pretty laissez-faire to me. But I can definitely see that interplay with jazz and the “comping” (to use a jazz term) on narration. Somewhat akin to Kerouac’s prose based on bebop and jazz. That’s a good point. Thanks for taking a moment to add to the discussion!
Lol, Thomas Nagel was a professor of mine at NYU ... and I've read tons of Dennet ... and I still found this novel completely captivating, in part b/c it conveys powerful concepts while still being totally digestible. That takes an incredible amount of nuance. Re: unicorns ... I think it is a false analogy to compare this to a fantasy where creatures interact with humans in the literal real world. It was pretty clear from the outset that that wasn't what was going on here. And the extended "point A to point B" passages are nothing compared to Lord of the Rings!
I’ve definitely come to a (late) realization that HM makes his own rules, thereby pretty much preemptively flaunting any attempt at analogy. Haha!
Yep writers I have read that take complex ideas and make them artistic and digestible are Blake Crouch (Dark Matter) and the short stories of Ted Chiang.
@@LeafbyLeaf That's for sure! And partly why I love his books. I actually got Ted Chiang's latest book the other day and I'll be reading it soon, really stoked to check it out. I tried Crouch's other book .. Recursion ... and wasn't that into it but I've heard Dark Matter is way better so I've been wanting to give that a shot at some point. Also, to be fair, I was "practicing my speed reading" when I read Recursion, lol ...
I came here after watching your review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, wondering what you would have to say about this book in comparison. Hard-Boiled is my favorite of the four Murakami novels I have read so far, and the others since have consistently frustrated me. I'm interested when you say that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle seems like the book he had been trying to write, because I had the exact opposite thought. I felt like he already did it more directly in Hard-Boiled Wonderland-though it was perhaps less complex and interpersonal, more isolated and lone, noir, ...hard-boiled. Might not reflect well on my tastes.
I wanted to also to comment on your observation of the amount of space Murakami dedicates to scenes of walking / transition from one place to another, which I'd never noticed before, and am happy to think about now. I would pair it up with your concept of all the eating and drinking as "keeping the character pinned to reality" (an analysis which I love), as activities which structure our everyday lives in a repetitive but necessary and very corporeal way. There are, for example, entire forms of meditation built around the activity of just walking. I wouldn't try to argue that Murakami is doing some kind of mindfulness practice by repeatedly discussing these things, since there is often an obvious component of daydreaming or projecting, thinking about others' lives, or for example the fantasy of women who can eat a ton(? okay Haruki). However, especially wrt walking, there might be, at the very least, some kind of underlying difference of cultural perspective on things that a western reader might view as interstitial or non-stuff. And I hate invoking East/West comparisons so superficially, I think it's overused, but it is what it is. Different people see things as "something [worth acknowledging]" or "nothing [i.e. not worth x]" in very different ways, indeed the idea of being "somebody" or being "a nobody" are very culturally and spiritually convoluted, can be subverted, destroyed, exaggerated, etc. So when Murakami's "average Joe" guy is just walking around idly thinking about something totally boring, a nobody doing nothing... there's something going on there. I can't finish this thought.
When I first read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, all the scenes of walking distances with his gut injury (after the torture scene) were so viscerally unpleasant to me, it was like an endurance trial. I literally had my own injury in roughly the same area at the time, and I was trying not to think about it, and I have a little bit of a phobic aversion to things like surgery or wounds of that nature. I was also commuting by the utterly jam-packed subway system, which sucked, but added to the parallel experience of traveling underground. It just made me think about the experience of moving around in daily life as a matter of enduring suffering, in a mundane way, and I sort of enjoyed it (despite that it was psychically painful for me). Today, on the other hand, I'll read like ten pages of Murakami's narrator talking about a car dealership or something, and the whole time I'm impatiently screaming inside. So, clearly, I learned nothing.
In defense of unicorns: those unicorns were pretty weird. Despite never before thinking about unicorns for longer than five seconds in my life, I was super into them. It's been several years since I read the book, but if I recall correctly, we're first introduced to them by seeing one of their strange skulls, and the skull is later used for some kind of scrying. Inside the Town, the unicorns are like domesticated herd animals, they're kind of wooly(? I could be misremembering this) and a lot of them die in the winter, which is not very magical of them. It's worth noting also (and I'm again going to invoke some dubious East/West thing, sorry) that mythical horned beasts exist in various forms across all kinds of disparate cultural traditions across history (mythical beasts, I might add, often intuited based on the discovery of strange skulls of extinct animals), and the one from East Asia that has been conflated with unicorns in recent times is the Qilin/Kirin. Even in Europe, unicorns have a very strange history; look up the "Unicorn tapestries" (or if you're near New York City, you could someday go see them at the Cloisters) and you'll find a story with a lot of bloodshed, captivity, inscrutable feudal stuff... I don't know if Murakami was in fact plainly thinking about European unicorns, or to what degree his picture of them is inflected with the Kirin, or if it was a translation thing, or if he cares, or what, but all I'm trying to say is he didn't seem to be picturing anything like the 1980s kitsch, Lisa-Frank-lookin', gleaming, angelic, blonde-maned, love-powered, valiant unicorn that has settled into a certain place in the collective imagination of recent times. I really love his willingness to mess-around with something so timelessly captivating yet sorta corny as a mythical beast, esp. in a way that resists the somewhat stagnant normal view of said creature. ALSO: It might even be a beer reference! I can't remember if they drink Kirin Ichiban in the book. Sorry, this is *way* more than I expected to write about unicorns when I started commenting.
Anyway, these videos are great. You've got me thinking about so much stuff I had forgotten or never connected up between books. I've been meaning to re-read this one, and I might come back here to update/contradict myself.
I want to come back and more fully comment, but I wanted to quickly thank you for this well-thought-out reply and for exemplifying how to disagree and counter constructively. Talk to you soon!
I saw the unicorn more as a deer like unicorn, as in a uni-antler. Due to the part with the russian whom found it referring to siberian unicorns. And in the end of the world they have a golden wooly fur. But now Im wondering why golden.
I must say, I don’t really agree with your opinion on extended narratives. I think the descriptions Murakami uses, even though they can be long for some, are made so well as to immerse yourself into the world. I personally like to take in these informations, sip in the atmosphere he is describing and becoming part of the scenery.
It has become one of my favourite novel alongside Norwegian Woods, which means a lot because it has been my favourite for a long time, but THIS.
WoW, what a journey. The End of the World city is so amazingly described with the atmosphere, especially the winter, so well described you can feel it.
The concept itself is so interesting and damn that ending made me shed a tear not gonna lie.
Great read really, I think it’s in fact underrated as I hadn’t heard about it until I dove deeper into his works.
We hear a lot about Kafka, Norwegian Woods and 1Q84, but not much about this one as well as The Wind up Bird Chronicle (Which I also loved)
Glad you connected with this one on such a deep level! Your point about immersion in the atmosphere/world is completely accurate, and I often find this connection with other writers. For whatever reason, I couldn’t connect with this one. Perhaps one day I’ll give it another go. Thanks for your input. All my best to you!
@@LeafbyLeaf
Well there’s a reason why there are so many books in this world after all !
We all react differently to the same things and it’s normal !
Have a great day ☺️☺️
Very well put! There are so many factors that go into our reaction to a book at any given time. And there have been plenty of books that I’ve disliked but then revisited and loved!
@@LeafbyLeaf
Indeed I have also experienced that ! It’s very interesting how our interest in something really depends on where we are at in our lives, as well as many other factors like you said so yourself
Yes, and I always appreciate it when someone offers an opposing opinion because it causes me to step back and reevaluate.
Thanks for the review very interesting. I’d really love to see your thoughts on the philosophies of the mind genre that you mentioned. The Essays The minds eye, and Thomas Chang etc. Maybe a separate video explaining them and recommended reading on the subject. Thanks
That would be a good video--thanks for the eye-dea!
A few books I recommend:
The Mind's I by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett (it's a collection of relevant essays)
The Feeling of What It's Like by Antonio Damasio
From Back to Bacteria and Back by Daniel Dennett
The Mystery of Consciousness by John Searle
I recommend both of the story collections of Ted Chiang.
Nice analysis. I felt like it had similarities in style and theme to Philip K Dick, Kafka’s The Trial and Castle and David Lynch (Mullholland Drive). Also Joseph Campbell and Jung with respect to dreams and metaphor. Joseph Campbell talks about the hero’s journey often going down through water, the belly of a whale, (or, in this case, a subterranean network of sewers or the lake outside the Wall of the town) to come out with a new self realization and changed in myth and in dreams. Del Torro was influenced by Campbell and Jung when creating his art like Pan’s Labyrinth. The Semiotecs are pretty directly alludes to the field of semiotics and signs, symbols, etc in art. The conscious/subconscious dichotomy plays throughout. For me he is Lynchian and the Naomi Watts character in Mullholland Drive lives simultaneously in a fantasy and nightmare world and in fact the real world is where she’s a failed actress and junkie at the end of the movie, but the story she tells herself is her alter ego at the start of the movie. Lynch is influenced by Jung and dreams. In Hard-Boiled, your comment about the dragging narrative taking many pages to move place to place to me just emphasizes the dream nature or nightmare of trying to accomplish something or get somewhere but time slows down and makes it seem like a slow process, just like dreams. So much to this book. I loved it, but it took three attempts to read it but now I really enjoyed it
I believe it is imperative that one verifies the publication date of a book before providing a review (the novel was first published in Japan in 1985 and later translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum in 1991). In addition, when critiquing a literary work, it is crucial to consider the historical context in which it was written. It is unacceptable to claim that a book is difficult to criticise due to other works consumed subsequently. This approach is akin to belittling Monet's work while praising Warhol's.
Thank you for your instructive feedback.
Dude, what do you mean nobody had personal computers in 1991?!
Millions of people did. The Apple II was released in 1977!
It’s been quite a while since I did this video, so I can’t remember exactly what I said or what I might have meant by this but-yikes! I’ll submit this to our Department of Blunders straight away! 🙏
Recently finished this book and have reviewed it on my channel Maha's Musings. Im a big admirer of Murakami's but I can see other aspects to it that were hmmm
Hey there! Thanks for letting me know. I'll check out what you have to say. All my best to you!
@@LeafbyLeaf Thanks Leaf. That's very kind of you. Best, Maha
This sounds like the most interesting Murakami so far in your journey, which isn't saying much, but still. I think Roberto Arlt owns the trademark for characters without proper names, by the way. Anyway, great video as always!
Thanks, George! This one definitely has its merits. Murakami is more confident (i.e. willing to take risks) here. I’ll have to check out Roberto Arlt-sounds vaguely familiar but I know I’ve not read any of his work.
Has anyone read Appleseed by John Clute?
I have not.
@@LeafbyLeaf I think it's probably considered a minor work, but I think the prose is audacious for a SF novel
I think the Calcutec and DreamReader live in two separate world. The shadow join with Calcutec in Real world (mind and body become one) in Consciousness 2 and
The DreamReader live in End of The World without mind. Yaps that's my theory.
But you can say that the Calcutec is dead.
Interesting!
@@LeafbyLeaf 😁 thanks but that's just my hypothesis... 🙏
I sadly can’t remember much of the novel now. Perhaps one day I’ll read it again. Thanks for sharing your theory!
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