Category: Books

Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a book by Haruki Murakami that I read a while ago in English, and I’ve recently reread in Spanish (my mother tongue). The first time I read it I got lost with so many metaphors and I didn’t like it that much. However, Pjorge advised me that it is one of those books that you enjoy more the second time you read it, and I decided to give it another chance. This time I enjoyed the read a lot more; I think it’s one of the best Murakami books. This time I was able to decipher many of the metaphors where I got lost the first time and I was able to have a better understanding of the connection between the two “worlds”.

As the name of the book suggests, the action in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is set in two completely different places. Part of the action is set in the “End of the World”, some kind of village where weird creatures live and which is visited by mysterious characters (the atmosphere of the village reminded me a lot of The Castle by Franz Kafka). On the other hand, the action in the “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” is set in the sewers and the tunnels of the Tokyo underground. It’s like Murakami had written two novels set in two completely different places and intertwined them masterfully in a single book. It is a book about: bones that talk, dreams, the connection between the subconscious and the conscious, self-discovery, computers, hackers, unicorns, monsters, dreams vs. reality, life and death, death is unavoidable and we have one life (shorter or longer) to accept it, the interconnection between places, people and events during our life.

Here are some quotes that grabbed my attention:

Your plain fat woman is fine. Fat women are like clouds in the sky. They’re just floating there, nothing to do with me.

You have to endure. If you endure, everything will be fine. No worry, no suffering. It all disappears. Forget about the shadow. This is the End of the World. This is where the world ends. Nowhere further to go.

We did thorough tracings of your cognitive systems. Then we made up simulations for storage in a main computer bank. We did it as a kind of insurance; you´d be stuck if anything happend t’you.

By the way, there is some people that says that the “INKlings” that appear on the book are kappas.

You can grab Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World at Amazon.

Other Haruki Murakami books:

• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
• A Wild Sheep Chase
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

For some years now, novels written with cellphones and read in cellphones have been really popular in Japan. In fact, they reached such a big audience that soon traditional publishers saw the opportunity and started to print them like traditional novels. Among the best selling novels category during the last 3 years, 4 of the top 10 novels in Japan were written with cellphones.

Novels written with cellphones have a very conversational style, they have short sentences, and sometimes they have too many abbreviations. Their style is a consequence of the characteristics of the medium used to write them and read them. Using a cellphone to write a 100,000 or 200,000 word novel is not an easy task, and being able to read it until the end in a small cellphone screen can be pretty painful. To make the reading easier, sentences are shorter, there are many spaces in between each paragraph and in most of the dialogues the characters hardly ever say many words in their interventions, not even a line.

The other day I found a whole shelf in Kinokuniya dedicated to books written with cellphones that have been successful in their digital form (having been bought and read from cellphones) and are now being sold in “analogic” format.

The Sea of Fertility is a tetralogy written by Yukio Mishima, which is considered by many his best work. The tetralogy consists of four books: Spring Snow, (春の雪; Haru no yuki), Runaway Horses (奔馬; Honba), The Temple of Dawn (暁の寺; Akatsuki no tera) and The Decay of the Angel (天人五衰; Tennin gosui). When he finished writing the last book he commited suicide in public following the seppuku ritual.

Yukio Mishima prepared his suicide for more than a year, he knew he was going to die after he finished writing the last book of his tetralogy. The plot of the books spans from 1912 until 1975. The main character is a law student named Honda that has high society friends, even within the imperial family. The first book tells the impossible love story between Satoko and Koyoaki (a friend of Honda), the problem is that Satoko must marry the son of the emperor in an arranged marriage following the omiai tradition. In the following books things keep happening to friends that Honda meets during his life.

Cover of the first book, Spring Snow.

Yukio Mishima was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times, and he sure would have received it if he hadn’t comitted suicide, The Sea of Fertility is considered one of the most valuable legacies of 20th century Japanese society. It’s a mandatory book to read if you want to become a “Japanology expert”.

You can buy the tetralogy at Amazon:

• Spring Snow
• Runaway Horses
• The Temple of Dawn
• The Decay of the Angel