HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum. 400 pp. New York: Kodansha International.
Enticed by news of Haruki Murakami's Japanese literary prizes and by translations of stories appearing in American magazines, 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.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World would have been better if Mr. Murakami had been able to get more emotion into his story. This futuristic tale begins intriguingly enough, with a garrulous young man 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. Down he goes to meet the doddering technocrat who has sent for him to perform a secret data-"shuffling" assignment. But the young man soon finds himself back in a vaguely mythic town, within which various factions -- INKlings, Semiotecs and Calcutecs -- go their curmudgeonly ways against a backdrop of unicorns, the herd of which is rapidly dying out.
By far the most appealing part of the story concerns itself with a technique for extracting dreams from unicorn skulls. Our bemused hero (who also seems to be the last of his species) goes off to the library, where an attractive female librarian shows him how. 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 of the book's illustrious relatives. There is an aura of Lewis Carroll, too.
My objection is that 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 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).
Even if Mr. Murakami couldn't develop his thematic material, he might have kept his readers' interest if he had used language in a way that wasn't inert and commonplace. The translation, one suspects, was not much help, since it misuses words like "transpire," "furthest" and "shined"; it is also full of redundancies that may or may not have come from the Japanese.
The characters in the novel are cardboard cutouts, not even animated enough to find their own lives banal. The young computer-whiz hero is as flat-minded as some people are flat-footed, and his approach to just about anything -- love, sex, memory, dreams, skulls, unicorns -- is usually prosaic. Why was he allowed to narrate a book? To demonstrate that jejune people are manipulating the gadgets of our time? It may be a valid point, but this isn't the way to make it.
The novel has another promising theme that goes nowhere. The narrator's shadow, taken away from him and kept under guard, decides not to wait around for the end of the world. Mr. Murakami rightly subordinates this theme to the one about the unicorn dreams, but the subordination doesn't work because the latter theme has no depth or development. One is left wondering about a world-end that seems to be very restricted in scope, but the 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.
Alas, the end of the world dwindles fast into a sophomoric funk suffered by a narrator whose prose style cannot be better than it is because -- get this -- he's not a writer. What an unfortunate bind to get into -- one that will not let you write your best.