Wow.
I haven't quite worked out the order in which Murakami's books were written, but, following the order in which I've read them, Hard-Boiled Wonderland definitely up-ended my expectations (I have a feeling that it was an early one, probably after A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, but before Wind-Up Bird). Fluid, surreal and dream-like, it's unmistakably Murakami, but it also has a sustained premise and resolution that, combined with the tautness of the story, makes it probably the most self-contained and immediately rewarding (the which is different from 'immediately enjoyable') of the books of his which I've read.
As ever, there's a lot to digest here, but, unlike in Murakami's other books, everything seems internally explicable - within the logic of the novel, things fit together, which is appropriate given that the central concern of Hard-Boiled Wonderland is the relationship between 'consciousness' and 'world', and in particular the manner in which consciousness constitutes the world...I read Hard-Boiled Wonderland as, amongst other things, a literary working-through of Husserlian phenomenology, and I really think that this is the central metaphor/theme of the book (rather than simply my importing my own preoccupations into the text); indeed, it seems central to all of Murakami's work.
I'm beginning to think that Murakami may have effected a more perfect fusion of 'high-brow' and 'low-brow' literature than anyone else I've read. His books are incredibly readable for all of their weightiness, and they stimulate on so many levels: the genre elements never seem superfluous or affected, and always seem to cut through to what makes those genres exciting and compelling in the first place; the peculiar, ordinarily 'impossible' takes place in such a light, matter-of-fact way that there's nothing to do but accept it; and, in this book, the sections near the end where the central character contemplates and prepares for 'the end of the world', with Dylan in the spaces and at the end, are really moving, dropping me straight into sad-wistful, heart in mouth mode.
As I said, wow.
