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Steve Fouse asked this question about Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World:
Has anybody got any ideas about why none the characters have names? The narrator is never named, and there are the chubby girl, the librarian(s), the Gatekeeper, and others. It may be a way of making the story's themes apply universally rather than just to specific people, but the characters are described in detail, and seem too real to be just nameless, non-specific persons.
Junta I recently read a collection of his essays, 'Novelist as Profession', published in Japan in 2015 (it might be a while before it's translated into Engl…moreI recently read a collection of his essays, 'Novelist as Profession', published in Japan in 2015 (it might be a while before it's translated into English) - the 9th chapter is on characters.

Although the answers submitted to this question are all valid, there is another simple reason mentioned in that chapter (my translation):
"I was okay with nicknames like 'The Rat' or 'J', but I just couldn't set proper names for the characters. Why not? I'm not sure myself, and can only say that I was embarrassed about naming people. I'm not sure how to put it, but it seemed somewhat artificial for someone like me to be freely designating names onto people (even if they were fictional characters I created).
The first time I was able to properly name characters was in 'Norwegian Wood' (1987). So, in the first eight years before that, I was using nameless characters and writing in the first person view. Thinking about it, it seems I was limiting myself with a tedious rule, but I didn't give it a second thought then."

tl;dr this novel was published in 1985, before Norwegian Wood when he started naming characters.(less)
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Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
by Haruki Murakami
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