Were mere tics and as if the book's gathering theme - the end of the world, no less - were best left for serious treatment to the likes of Nevil Shute (whose 'On the Beach' at least has passion).Įven if Mr. Murakami's novel, wherever it calls for imaginative and inventive expansion, fobs us off with generics and categories, as if the agony and beauty of memory were a comic strip, as if love and desire If this sounds like a mishmash of Kafka, Dino Buzzati's novel 'The Tartar Steppe' and the movies 'Blade Runner' and 'Alphaville,' then you have some idea Our bemused hero (who also seems to be the last of his species) goes off to the library, where an attractiveįemale librarian shows him how. Their curmudgeonly ways against a backdrop of unicorns, the herd of which is rapidly dying out.īy far the most appealing part of the story concerns itself with a technique for extracting dreams from unicorn skulls. But the young man soon finds himself back in a vaguely mythic town, within which various factions - INKlings, Semiotecs and Calcutecs - go Who has sent for him to perform a secret data-'shuffling' assignment. Down he goes to meet the doddering technocrat Who ascends in a spacious elevator to a corridor where a plump young woman waits to escort him to a closet, at the bottom of which is a chasm with a river running through it. This futuristic tale begins intriguingly enough, with a garrulous young man Murakami had been able to get more emotion into his story.

'Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World' would have been better if Mr. 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. Nticed by news of Haruki Murakami's Japanese literary prizes and by translations of stories appearing in American magazines, HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLDīy Haruki Murakami. SeptemStealing Dreams From Unicorns By PAUL WEST

Haruki murakami end of the world