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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.
André It's actually just something that's typical of Japanese literature. There's plenty of authors who only give their characters initials as name or use t…moreIt's actually just something that's typical of Japanese literature. There's plenty of authors who only give their characters initials as name or use titles instead of names. Writing from the perspective of an unnamed main character is a common aspect of so-called Japanese "I-Novels", too, possibly the most successful genre of modern Japanese literature, though Murakami is post-modern of course.
(Hell, many of the earliest Japanese literary works do not provide a name for their protagonist!)

Keep in mind as well that there are many, many more ways to say "I" in Japanese than there are in English - some of which carry a lot of nuance (a good example would be Natsume Soseki's "I Am a Cat", which uses the term Wagahai in its original Japanese title, an extremely over the top way of addressing yourself that is similar to the Royal We in English - and that is lost when we are reduced to translating it as "I").
I haven't read this particular book in a while, but I believe the "I" in the two worlds uses DIFFERENT pronouns in Japanese. One uses the more formal Watashi while the other uses Boku. Both names carry nuance - and most importantly, unlike in the English translation, are not the same name at all.(less)
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Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
by Haruki Murakami
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