This is your brain (an egg). This is your brain on Murakami (an egg sprouting arms and legs and attempting to hump other eggs while doing the Electric Slide and attempting to save the world to a killer soundtrack). If you like Murakami, you'll like it, although it doesn't blend the two twisted sides of Murakami's writing as well as a book like "Norwegian Wood" or "Kafka on the Shore." In each of those novels, the reader gets transitions within chapters, and his talents for myth-telling in both t...

“Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in fight, searching the skies for dreams.” Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World ~~ Haruki MurakamiBuddy read with my friend, Srđan.There is so much to say about Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; I'm just not certain I'm the one to say it. I was never able to quite connect with the characters or the plot on an emotional level. Part of the problem is that Murakami attempts to blend so many different literary genre...

Sekai no Owari to Hādoboirudo Wandārando = Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a 1985 novel by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. The English translation by Alfred Birnbaum was released in 1991. A strange and dreamlike novel, its chapters alternate between two bizarre narratives—"Hard-Boiled Wonderland" (a cyberpunk-like, science fiction part) and "The End of the World" (a virtual fantasy-like, surreal part).تاریخ نخست...

Maybe you’ve heard it said before: in every joke there is a grain of truth. Well, as many of you may remember, I’ve been known to pick on Jay Rubin now and again for what I perceive to be his clunky translations of Murakami’s flawless prose. Because it couldn’t possibly be that Haruki is a clunky writer. Get that thought out of your head right now!! So I like to kid poor Jay and make him the scapegoat, but the more I think about it, the more validity I find in my little quips. You see, dear read...

In the unlikely event that Haruki Murakami's name on the cover is not in some way a quality label to you, guaranteeing profoundly outlandish scenarios and magic, he threw in the term "wonderland" to make sure everyone knew what to expect. Does the story deliver on all the promises this wonderful title embodies?Yes.I decided to re-visit this book after having read it around 3 years ago (before my reviewing habit kicked in) because I remembered it being an instant favorite but didn't remember why

I am SO disappointed right now! I read a short story collection by Murakami a short time ago, and I loved it! I loved his writing, and I mostly liked the imaginative side of the stories. This book, despite the fact that this was full of imagination, it ended up being a confused, weird mess, that I just couldn't wait to finish.This book was creative, but it just bored me endlessly. None of the chapters fused together to make a readable story, and it left me feeling frustrated.I got the feeling th...

And I couldn't be any other self but my self. Could I? There is always a possibility.In the summer of 1962, a poet wrote a song that would later become the last hymn to be heard as the end of the world approached. That is the song I chose to be my companion while writing another non-review; a song that is being followed closely by the mellifluous gusts of wind that break the silence of this monochromatic night. Being my first Murakami, quite frankly, I didn't know what to expect. This is, wit

Whew, blew me away. The influences from Orwell and Kafka are clearly here. Existential meditations, amazingly imaginative, the multitude of interesting and important thoughts that can sprout from the reader's mind. The whole thing is pure genius."That's the way it is with the mind. Nothing is ever equal. Like a river, as it flows, the course changes with the terrain."Typically, Murakami works his way through your subconscious, toying with recognitions of the past and future, in that magical stat...

“Everyone may be ordinary, but they're not normal.”Haruki Murakami's novels are filled with seemingly ordinary people, but with Murakami, ordinary takes on a whole new meaning. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, our protagonist's day at the office plays out in parallel worlds the existence of which he barely questions. Becoming a dreamreader of unicorn skulls? Nothing unusual here; let's get to it! "There's normal and then there's normal," responds our narrator. Immersion into M...

This is an OK Murakami. My 8th and still counting. I will always admire his imagination, creativity and passion in writing. He will always be in my Top 10 Favorite Novelists list. But I am rating this as an OK book. Not my favorite Murakami. The reason? It just did not excite me.Since I became an voracious reader and that happened partly because of Goodreads, I only religiously watch two shows: news (whichever I catch upon coming back home at night) and American Idol. Reading Hard-boiled Wonderl...

The main attraction of this wild literary romp about the workings of the human mind is its daring clash of genres and its intricate composition: This novel has elements of sci-fi, fantasy, cyberpunk, dystopia, fairy tale, parable, American detective fiction, psychological novel, adventure/quest novel, novel of ideas, and even jump-and-run computer games (tunnels! shafts!). Murakami alternates between two worlds, and as the story progresses, it becomes clear how they are connected. "Hard-boiled w...

I’m sorry this one didn’t get on my radar sooner. It’s quintessential Murakami, blending genres in his signature weird and wonderful way—fantasy, sci fi, noir, fable, magical realism. This novel from 1985 gives us a dystopia and a utopia for the price of one. In the former, our unnamed, thirty-something male protagonist works as a contracted Calcutec in Tokyo, a human encrypting device for the sanctioned espionage group, the System. Their main enemy in the “Infowar” are the Semiotecs, which serv...

Y'know when you're watching a film and there's a shot or even a sequence that's just really cleverly done? Like all the long shots in Roma or the locust swarms in Days of Heaven or essentially all of Fitzcarraldo ? These scenes rip you from the suspended disbelief of narrative and force you to witness the film as a technical product. You think, ah! that was very clever, kudos to the person who did that. That brief moment when you couldn't care less about what is actually happening in the world

Right BrainUpon the fields, yet of no snow,frolic an acquiescence we yet to sow,brilliant beasts, their golden fleece ready to unfurl,trod this place, the end of the world.Upon this fantasy, comes one of twounnamed narrators who works in lieuof status, volition; vagueness washes his mind,all Kafkaesque, he becomes a dream-reading blind.On a lost elevator in the counterpart planeall events are concurrent and faintly the same; the dyadic complement of the twin consciousis a tech-savvy tokyoite obs...

"This was getting weird. Even if I believed him, I wouldn’t believe it."This is the most philosophical of Murakami's books that I've read so far, and the most melancholic. It's also, along with Kafka on the Shore, my favourite.It's twisty and vibrant and weird - in other words, typical Murakami. There are unicorns and dream worlds, libraries, librarians, and imprisoned shadows. And let's not leave out the mysterious, evil INKlings, hiding out in a nightmarish subterranean world.I'm hesitant to w...