Neuro-Vault: The protagonist of Hard-Boiled Wonderland has top secret data hidden inside his subconscious to prevent the anti-government Semiotecs from getting at it. A number of places mentioned in the novel, such as Jingu Baseball Stadium, are also of special importance to the author. As he writes about in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, it was while witnessing a home run at the stadium that he first decided he could write a novel. Meiji Jingu Baseball Stadium

Our narrator lives in an unnamed part of Setagaya Ward, and all we really know about it is that it contains a library. Setagaya is one of the largest and most populous wards in Tokyo which makes guessing the approximate location difficult.O'Reilly, Shane. "Five Novels That Influenced Haruki Murakami's Writing". Bookwitty. Archived from the original on June 26, 2018 . Retrieved November 8, 2021. The story involves a break from reality of sorts, in which suddenly, strange phenomena is described and we learn of unusual brain implants that the main character had, which exposed him to the domino effect of all that occurs within the story. The tale jumps between the eccentric, colorful man we are first introduced to, to a flat, droll, somewhat lifeless man in a gray and eerie landscape. We begin to learn how these two men are connected, and there is much symbolism and concepts of what consciousness, souls, reality and existence really are. The reference to "The End of the World" is obvious in Japanese editions of the novel because an epigraph quotes from the lyrics and credits for the song are appended at the end. For some reason, however, neither epigraph nor credits are included in the English translation, which obscures the musical reference and has led one critic to mistakenly identify the song as originating with the Carpenters in the 1970s. [6]

readers might expect his new novel to be as slangy and vivacious as "A Wild Sheep Chase," the 1989 novel that was the first of his many books to appear in English. But they will be disappointed.The first story, Hard Boiled Wonderland, is a sort of detective story set in a technomagically realistic Tokyo somewhere in the vicinity of the present. This story follows a man working for The System: a pseudogovernmental organization dedicated to the keeping of certain information secret. This man is, essentially, a human encryption device. Simply put, he encodes data using the structure of his brain as a sortof encoding key. This character gets assigned to a particularly interesting encryption job where he must use special advanced (and prohibited) techniques which make use of his subconscious mind. This job, however, embroils him in a strange world of intrigue on levels he never imagined both figuratively and literally. The first narrative ("Hard-Boiled Wonderland") tells the story of an unnamed protagonist in a Cyberpunk future Tokyo who is trained to be what is essentially a human data processor, whose subconscious holds an encryption key to prevent the information from falling into the wrong hands. The second narrative ("The End of the World") follows an individual who has just arrived in a strange walled town where the inhabitants, including the narrator, have been separated from their shadows and are not allowed to go beyond the town wall. The two parallel narratives begin to bleed through into one another as the novel reaches its conclusion, exploring themes of identity and consciousness. And I Must Scream: What the protagonist and the Professor think living inside one's own mind would be like. shadow seems to have the answer: the narrator is living in a realm of his own invention, and that makes the whole book an exercise in imagery, throwing the burden for its success on the sensitivity and subtlety of the writing. nticed by news of Haruki Murakami's Japanese literary prizes and by translations of stories appearing in American magazines,