Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Sometimes, reading works this way. You pick up a book because you heard rave reviews about it, but you just can't seem to "get into" it, a term I borrow from fellow avid reader JC. But a few years later, suddenly you remember this book again or somehow bump into it, and this time you manage to "get into" it.

Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by my favourite author Haruki Murakami is such a book. I can easily "get into" all his books, but this one, I actually tried three times and finally managed to "get into" the right mood to follow it, and this is like a number of years after I first hear of this title. You know why it's so hard to "get into" it? For me, it's the hard-boiled portion. I've never been a fan of detective and science fiction, this book is a combination of these two, plus a huge plot involving high fantasy - another genre that I don't fancy much. Naturally, it didn't catch on. I probably wouldn't persevere if it's not the Murakami brand name that sustains me.

But you know what? Turned out I enjoyed it, still. I wouldn't rank it as my favourite Murakami work, but it is very good nevertheless. In the beginning, the reader is led into two separate stories staggered in alternating chapters. One is detective cum science fiction, the other is fantasy. As the plot unfolds, the two stories running on parallel tracks start to converge to form a highly imaginative story where the protagonist is forced to choose between the real or imagined world where he wants to live in.

One little trivia that I picked out - Murakami seems to like libraries and librarians a lot. It makes me wonder if he is not a writer or jazz club owner, would he be a librarian? He featured libraries and librarians very prominently in his books, such as Kafka on the Shore (this is my favourite Murakami book) where the protagonist sought refuge in a special library where the librarian is an androgynous young man. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland, the protagonist also found love in a long-haired librarian with a bottomless-pit of an appetite. I always feel that even in works of fiction, there must be some truth about it that is linked back to the past experience of the author. If you read a work of fiction, you can surely see traces of the author in it. I am sure that's why Jazz, oldies, Franz Kafka, cats and libraries/librarians are featured repeatedly in Murakami's books. There's got to be a link somewhere about libraries/librarians.

I also wonder if Haruki Murakami is a common name in Japan, like our equivalent of John Tan or Kelvin Lee. I mentioned that I attended a library conference in Korea recently. Believe it or not, I saw one of the poster session presentation as "An Approach to Exploring Subject Headings and Classifications by Haruki Murakami and Hiroshi Ueda and Takashi Hirata". I nearly did a double-take when I read the program. I didn't get to attend the poster session as I had other sessions more related to my area of work to attend, but I've been wondering ever since how this librarian Haruki Murakami look like.