The first thing that is probably running through your head right now is, “What the heck is even going on here?” Well, expect to get very few answers, because this is a book you not only read, but interpret, discuss and analyze. As he is making the map and learning about the town, the narrator learns things about his past and even falls in love with the librarian in the process. After reading the first few dreams, however, the narrator meets back up with his shadow who requests that he make a map of the town so that they can escape and reunite. Set in a town that is contained in a wall so high only birds can fly over it, where nobody has any sense of identity or self, shadows are severed upon entering, and where unicorns roam free, this fantasy dystopia concerns another unnamed narrator who moves into the town with no memory of his former life and is forced into becoming the town’s Dreamreader, a person who has to go to the library every night and read dreams and fragments of minds contained in the unicorns’ skulls. The “End of the World” narrative is drastically different than the former. This is only part of the story, as the narrator soon finds himself plunged into a massive conspiracy theory involving the very people he works for, underground monsters called INKlings, and one very mysterious object given to him by the professor – a unicorn skull. What is shuffling? Well, let’s just say it involves plunging your mind into pure chaos and basically becoming a living encrypter for a set amount of time. The narrator is contracted by an aging professor to do something very sketchy and possibly illegal – shuffle a set of data involving the professor’s research involving sound removal and skulls. His job is to both encrypt and protect data from the cyber-criminal Semiotecs, who steal data for their group, the Factory. The “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” narrative centers on an unnamed, male narrator who we know little to nothing of, other than the fact that he is a Calcutec, a person who is basically little more than a living, breathing, data processor who works for the massive conglomerate known as the System. For the sake of convenience, I will summarize each story as if they were separate novels, but bear in mind that these stories need to be read together in order to fully understand the novel. The odd-numbered chapters form the “Hard-Boiled Wonderland,” a cyberpunk, science fiction, and quasi-detective story, and the even chapters form the “End of the World,” a fantasy dystopian narrative.

This strange novel is actually two stories and alternates between them.

Unicorn skulls, subterranean monsters, a mad scientist, a town surrounded by a massive wall, and Bob Dylan? What is even going on here? Well, that is just a taste of the colorful, beautiful, surreal and depressing dual narrative that forms Haruki Murakami’s 1985, award-winning masterpiece “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.”

A hard boiled wonderland