Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

by Haruki Murakami

Silence floated up from the receiver like smoke from the mouth of a gun.

Still, you’d think they could have rung the bell before trying to break the door down.

The System monopolizes everything under the info sun, the Factory monopolizes everything in the shadows.

Sun and shadows are another common thread between the stories.

The passing of autumn leaves a temporary blank, an empty hole in the year that is not of a season at all.

Signs of winter shroud the Town like an invisible skin. The sound of the wind, the swaying of the grasses, the clack of heels on the cobblestones in the still of night, all grow remote under an ominous weight.

The sky is overcast, a pallid cover through which the light filters and settles.

there unfolds a mysteriously peaceful world. Infused with the life breath one senses in the wild, the Woods give me release. How can this be the minefield of dangers the old Colonel has warned me against? Here the trees and plants and tiny living things partake of a seamless living fabric; in every stone, in every clod of earth, one senses an immutable order.

All shades of misfortune soon dissipate, while the very shapes of the trees and colors of the foliage grow somehow more restive, the bird songs longer and more leisurely. In the tiny glades, in the breezes that wend through the inner woodlands, there is none of the darkness and tension I have felt nearer the Wall.

A lush carpet of grass spreads over the ground, while overhead a puzzle-piece of sky cuts through the treetops.

The short sleep in the cold has consumed all warmth in me, leaving my head swimming with abstract shapes.

Do I occupy the body of another? Everything is so ponderously heavy, so vague.

Is this how the two protagonists are related?

The ground is clothed in blankness. No moon, no stars, all has been subdued by the flurries of snow. I hear the chill sound of the water, the wind taunting through the trees behind me.

She sits me in front of the stove and places her hand on my forehead. Her hand is as ice. My reflex is to push it away, but I cannot raise my hand. For when I do, I feel a sudden nausea.

This book is so disorienting, which I love.

I didn’t know how this was going to turn out, but neither did they. Nobody can outguess the future.

It is raining outside. I hear it, ice cold, striking the roof, pouring into the ground. The sounds could be coming from my bedside, or from a mile away.

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.”

Winter has given everything around me a mysterious weight; I alone seem an outsider to that ponderous world.

A yellow powder of light diffuses in a halo behind her, veiling her silhouette. She wears her blue coat, her hair gathered round inside her collar. The scent of the winter wind is on her.

You said that the mind is like the wind, but perhaps it is we who are like the wind. Knowing nothing, simply blowing through. Never aging, never dying.”

Another boxcar of pain rolled in. I shut my mouth and waited at the crossing.

There would be a landscape I have not seen before, unfamiliar melodic echoes, whisperings in a chaos of tongues. They drift up fitfully and as suddenly sink into darkness.

A pale silver moon trembles on the face of the water.

In front of the overturned desk, a whole box of scattered paperclips glinted in the fluorescent light. There was something about them, I didn’t know what. I picked one up from the floor and slipped it into my pocket.

The morning sun tore through the clouds, setting the frozen landscape agleam, the frosty breath of more than a thousand beasts dancing whitely in the air.

so he left those as trail markers.”

Paperclips as trail-markers...interesting

But of course there was no sun nor moon nor stars overhead. Darkness hung heavy over me.

Another connection point?

“They would never take to the shelter. They would continue to sleep on the ground as always. They would sleep out in the elements, even if it means they die.”

Fascinating- I wonder if that has deeper metaphorical meaning.

The ice-encrusted Town refracts like a huge, many-faceted jewel, sending knives of light to stab my eyes.

Everything is made in the image of something.

Why? Interesting dreamy trippy disorienting detail...hmmm

My memory is solid rock. It does not budge. My head hurts. Losing my shadow, I have lost much. What is left is sealed over in the winter cold.

“That’s the way it is with the mind. Nothing is ever equal. Like a river, as it flows, the course changes with the terrain.”

“Yes, the talking had a … an accent to it. Mother would draw words out or she would make them short. Her voice would sound high and low, like the wind.” “That is singing,” I suddenly realize. “Can you talk like that?” “Singing is not talking. It is song.” “Can you do it too?” she says. I take a deep breath but find no music in my memory. “I’m sorry. I cannot remember a single song,” I say.

This world is so confusing its almost not even real...

“No, this does not make music. It makes words. I think they called it a typewriter.”

Makes you rethink what defines a musical instrument

the heavens boiling thick with cloud matter. In the less than lunar light, the River recedes black as tar.

A reedy whistling echoing through the darkness like the humming of thousands of subterranean insects triggered by the same stimulus. The sound did not wish us well.

I got the uncanny feeling that the sound was beckoning us, a beast lying in wait for its prey.

Inklings / beasts? Also hallucination mind control and brainwashing / losing one's mind seems to be becoming a theme here

My sense of time was paralyzed.

poetry in motion

As awareness spliced together, I noted the nylon rope. I was a piece of laundry blown off the line by gale winds. I had developed a habit of transposing my circumstances into all sorts of convenient analogues.

Twisting whips of air, like feelers from below, completely enveloped us in a bristling night forest.

I wanted light, any light, real light.

The connections are probably abl fake right? I can't imgine. It's pretty genius.

An enormous shadow of the arching water is cast against the concrete expanse. I stare, and the shadow gradually becomes my shadow. I sit there, transfixed. I know it’s my shadow flickering on the curve of the dam,

The shadow is trying to tell me something.

Ahhhhh the mirrors between the two stories are amazing!

Until this moment the memory, it seemed, had been sealed off from the sludge of my consciousness by an intervening force.

The sun is stripped of light and warmth, the sky is cloaked in heavy clouds. Trees send up crooked, leafless branches into the chill gray, like cracks in the firmament. Surely snow will fall through, yet the air is still.

A mosaic of winter sky shows between the branches.

the total distortion is seamless.

That is exactly how I feel about the entire book. It ebbs and flows without a sound and disorients you smoothly into a dreamlike state.

There has to be a trick. The system must take in and let out somewhere.”

The system...

No monkey’s got functions complex enough t’stand in for human subconscious psychology and memory.”

Accordin’ t’what you’re up against, almost instantaneously, you elect some point between the extremes. That’s the precision programming you’ve got built in. You yourself don’t know a thing about the inner shenanigans of that program. ’Tisn’t any need for you t’know. Even without you knowin’, you function as yourself.