Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

by Haruki Murakami

For only through assiduous repetition is it possible to redistribute skewed tendencies.

Not that I’m such a blasé, convenience-sake sort of guy—although I do have tendencies in that direction—but because more often than not I’ve observed that convenient approximations bring you closest to comprehending the true nature of things.

Which isn’t to say you can’t always use a little more practice. Repetition can improve your technique and refine your style.

Semiotecs traffic illegally obtained data and other information on the black market, making megaprofits. And what’s worse, they keep the most valuable bits of information for themselves and the benefit of their own organization. Our organization is generally called the System, theirs the Factory. The System was originally a private conglomerate, but as it grew in importance it took on quasi-governmental status.

As for the Factory, much less is known. It apparently started off as a small-scale venture and grew by leaps and bounds. Some refer to it as the Data Mafia, and to be certain, it does bear a marked resemblance in its rhizomic penetration to various other underworld organizations.

I wasn’t particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don’t have to die the next. All quite simple, if you want to look at it that way. Life’s no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe’s my own to fool with. Hence I can live with it.

“Everyone may be ordinary, but they’re not normal.”

“The mind is nothing you use,” I say. “The mind is just there. It is like the wind. You simply feel its movements.”

Expect nothing, get nothing.

“Do a good job. A body who works bad thinks bad, I always say.”

Is Japan a total monopoly state or what? The System monopolizes everything under the info sun, the Factory monopolizes everything in the shadows. They don’t know the meaning of competition.

“No. Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.”

Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.

Each individual behaves on the basis of his individual mnemonic makeup. No two human beings are alike; it’s a question of identity. And what is identity? The cognitive system arisin’ from the aggregate memories of that individual’s past experiences. The layman’s word for this is the mind.

Metaphysics is never more than semantic pleasantries anyway.

“So how does all this have anything to do with the world ending?” An innocent question. “Accurately speaking, it isn’t this world. It’s the world in your mind that’s going to end.” “You’ve lost me,” I said. “It’s your core consciousness. The vision displayed in your consciousness is the End of the World. Why you have the likes of that tucked away in there, I can’t say. But for whatever reason, it’s there. Meanwhile, this world in your mind here is coming to an end. Or t’put it another way, your mind will be living there, in the place called the End of the World. “Everythin’ that’s in this world here and now is missin’ from that world. There’s no time, no life, no death. No values in any strict sense. No self. In that world of yours, people’s selves are externalized into beasts.”

“There you are. Humans are immortal in their thought. Though strictly speakin’, not immortal, but endlessly, asymptotically close to immortal. That’s eternal life.”

“They dig holes from time to time,” the Colonel explains. “It is probably for them what chess is for me. It has no special meaning, does not transport them anywhere. All of us dig at our own pure holes. We have nothing to achieve by our activities, nowhere to get to. Is there not something marvelous about this? We hurt no one and no one gets hurt. No victory, no defeat.”

“Just now, you spoke of the Town’s perfection. Sure, the people here—the Gatekeeper aside—don’t hurt anyone. No one hurts each other, no one has wants. All are contented and at peace. Why is that? It’s because they have no mind.” “That much I know too well,” I say. “It is by relinquishing their mind that the Townfolk lose time; their awareness becomes a clean slate of eternity. As I said, no one grows old or dies. All that’s required is that you strip away the shadow that is the grounding of the self and watch it die. Once your shadow dies, you haven’t a problem in the world. You need only to skim off the discharges of mind that rise each day.”

Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.

“When the beasts die, the Gatekeeper cuts off their heads,” my shadow goes on, unrelenting. “By then, their skulls are indelibly etched with self. These skulls are scraped and buried for a full year in the ground to leech away their energy, then taken to the Library stacks, where they sit until the Dreamreader’s hands release the last glimmers of mind into the air. That’s what ‘old dreams’ are. Dreamreading is a task for newcomers to the Town—people whose shadows have not yet died. The Dreamreader reads each spark of self into the air, where it diffuses and dissipates. You are a lightning rod; your task is to ground. Do you see?” “I believe I do.” “When the Dreamreader’s shadow dies, he ceases to be Dreamreader and becomes one with the Town. This is how it’s possible for the Town to maintain its perfection. All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the ‘perfect’ can live content and oblivious. Is that the way it should be? Did you ever think to look at things from the viewpoint of the beasts and shadows and Woodsfolk?”

I was bound for the world of immortality. That’s what the Professor said. The End of the World was not death but a transposition. I would be myself. I would be reunited with what I had already lost and was now losing.

Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?

“As a whole, humanity doesn’t lend itself to generalizations. But as I see it, there are two types of people: the comprehensive-vision type and the limited-perspective type. Me, I seem to be the latter. Not that I ever had much problem justifying my limits. A person has to draw lines somewhere.” “But most people who think that way keep pushing their limits, don’t they?” “Not me. There’s no reason why everyone has to listen to records in hi-fi. Having the violins on the left and the bass on the right doesn’t make the music more profound. It’s just a more complex way of stimulating a bored imagination.”

“Well, toward the end, Alyosha is speaking to a young student named Kolya Krasotkin. And he says, Kolya, you’re going to have a miserable future. But overall, you’ll have a happy life.” Two beers down, I hesitated before opening my third. “When I first read that, I didn’t know what Alyosha meant,” I said. “How was it possible for a life of misery to be happy overall? But then I understood, that misery could be limited to the future.”

Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.

There is no ‘why’ in a world that would be perfect in itself.