Haruki Murakami - Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

One of Murakami's earlier works, and one heck of a definitive one. Murakami practically LAUNCHED his career in surrealist writing via this book (Norwegian Wood being more of a poppy introduction to the man himself), endearing himself to the masses who constantly seek quality fiction with more twists than the entire Harry Potter series.

The story involves 2 converging plotlines (though, to be fair, at the end they don't EVEN converge coherently), of the same people inhabiting 2 separate worlds. The blurb on the book jacket describes it as a "narrative particle accelerator"; there is a modicum of truth in that observation, the story flitting between a functionary in a physics laboratory and a man whose function in life is to read skulls for dreams.

Soon, the INKlings come into the picture, and it slowly assumes science fiction novel qualities; on the other hand, the many trysts, relationships, and breaking of human hearts endears the protagonists to the humanists out there. There is a crushing inevitability of progression throughout; you can see things inexorably accelerating to the conclusion, but for your life, you cannot see the plot twists as they come.

References to Western popular culture are arife; song titles jauntily come and go, and scenes occur in Denny's (a reference readily available in After Dark too); one is immediately struck by how Western this novel is, with its easy references to Western pulp fiction.

A beautiful book, indeed, combining elements from East and West, Oriental and Occidental, fantasy and reality. Indeed, the perfect introduction to Murakami's work, if you cannot stomach the 600-page monstrosity that the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle will prove to be.