Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of studies of split-brain patients has been the possibility that each cerebral hemisphere is separately conscious following bisection. The question has interested philosophers and scientists alike and the celebrated Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has written a book that may well be its fictive apotheosis.
Enter a nameless 35 year old "Calcutec" who processes data for a quasi-governmental data-bank called the System. His career goal is to retire by 50 to an idyllic retreat where he can study Greek and play the cello. With this in mind, he has submitted to a neurosurgical experiment that enables him to "shuffle," or encrypt, data, thereby boosting his fees.
The first chapter leads him into the subterranean lab of the visionary scientist who invented the practice of shuffling. The fusion of neurophysiological/technological rhetoric that Murakami uses to describe this and other of the novel's fanciful processes is inspired and most persuasive. Combine such qualities with a deep affection for the narrator and you get precise renderings of a world wherein the mind, saleable and upgradable as a cpu, is literally up for grabs, and the protagonist spends his downtime ruminating in bed with a glass of scotch and a copy of Red and Black. This touch of vulnerability marks him easily as a focal pawn in an information war being waged between the System and the hackers who sell its data for megaprofits on the black market. But the Calcutec's wits are adroitly about him, and he proves more than adequate in espionage.
These preliminaries point only to the 20 odd-numbered chapters of the novel, which appear under the heading Hardboiled Wonderland.
The novel's even-numbered chapters contain The End of the World, that inaccessible alternate "reality" that is the Calcutec's "core consciousness." Rendered in uncanny prose, it takes on the form of a walled town containing mindless people, unicorns and a narrator cruelly separated from his shadow. This latter fellow, the Calcutec's double, occupies himself by reading dreams from the skulls of dead beasts, romancing the town's undead librarian and mapping the end of the world with hopes of helping his imprisoned shadow to escape. The sense that our bilateral narrators are onto each other provides the plot with rare urgency as the Calcutec/Dreamreader wends his way towards an inkling of himself, learning in the process that such knowledge resonates eternally.
Murakami's fourth novel is a poetic and extremely entertaining metaphor for the corpus callosum, the brain's main pathway for interhemispheric communication. Thematically conversant with cyberpunk, detective fiction, hypodiagetic tomfoolery and other genres, it offers many things besides. Reading it was like travelling from the wingtips into the depths of a textual rorshach blot, wherein a rush of vertigo appeared along with the image of an escaping bird and the memorable line, "What's lost never perishes." The absorbing, permutative tour de force of narrative symmetry in which Murakami embeds his unique exploration of bilateralism puts Hardboiled... in a class of its own.