Call this Inception
by way of The Wizard of Oz. In fact, readers that loved either of those
movies should embrace Murakami’s work which mixes a stylized reality with a
dream world populated by people from the “reality.” The protagonist is a
"calcutec," a human data processor perhaps inspired by William
Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic.
The book slipstreams between science fiction, hardboiled
noir, cyberpunk, horror, and literary fiction.
(There’s definitely a little Franz Kafka here.) It's a dazzling, dizzying bit of writing that
fits nicely into the "new weird" typified by China Mieville’s The City and the City, where two
different worlds exist simultaneously in the same place.
Murakami is working with a palette that includes ambiguity,
consciousness, and self. In both
sections of the book, the hero (an unnamed Narrator) is an outsider who’s being
kept off-balance and trying to fit in.
Perhaps the best way to read the book is to see it as a spy
story in the Bourne Identity
mold. The Calcutec is a pawn in the
info-war going on between the System and the Factory, and he ends up in End of
the World severed from his shadow, the repository of memory. The scenes where the narrator tries to help
the librarian remember are filled with a delicate emotion that could be intense
in performance. (This material could
easily be adapted into a play, with the different locations indicated by
differing lighting.)
This novel is literate, adult entertainment with an edge of
magic and a veneer of science fiction; a romp through the tropes of pop culture,
and cross-culturally (and self-consciously) hip, in an almost cinematic way. In
the end, this is a brilliant book.
