“Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” by Haruki Murakami (translated by Alfred Birnbaum)

This is a philosophical fantasy novel about the nature of human consciousness. “In time your mind will not matter. It will go, and with it goes all sense of loss, all sorrow. Nor will love matter. Only living will remain. Undisturbed, peaceful living.” Of course, there are the classic Murakami pop references sprinkled throughout. The music of Bob Dylan and the fiction of Ivan Turgenev play reoccurring roles. “I almost never identify with anybody in Dostoyevsky, but the characters in Turgenev’s old-fashioned novels are such victims of circumstance, I jump right in. I have a thing about losers.” The structure of the novel is also classic Murakami, with chapters that alternate between two different plot lines, until the mystery unravels and the two stories merge into one. The characters are also as quirky as usual. The hero has a thing for whiskey, jazz records, and cooking. There is an absent-minded professor, a dwarf and giant gangster duo, a chubby, sex-starved teen, dressed only in pink, and a brainy librarian with gastric abnormalities. “Chubby girls in pink tend to conjure up images of big strawberry shortcakes waltzing on a dance floor, but in her case the color suited her.” There is also a fair share of scientific speculation thrown into the mix. “Don’t blame me. That’s evolution. Evolution’s always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution…. Evolution is mighty gruelin’. What do you think the most gruelin’ thing about evolution is?… It’s being unable to pick and choose. Nobody chooses to evolve.” And as usual for Murakami, the plot has plenty of fantastical elements too- glowing unicorn skulls, talking shadows, dream-reading, underground monsters, herds of beasts, and mind-altering brain surgery. “Shuffling was a door to a new world. He said that although he’d developed it as a method for scrambling computer data, with a little doing a person might scramble the world.” The plot is almost besides the point. It does the work of carrying the book’s digressions into philosophy—on the nature of life, what is truly important in this world, how memory works, and what it is that makes a mind human. “Many things will become clear for you over the course of the winter. Whether or not you like what you learn, it will come to pass. The snow will fall, the beasts will die. No one can stop this.”