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Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
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  • Published: 26 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529968484
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Apr 2003
EBook
10 Oct 2011
Audiobook
26 June 2025
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Murakami's most mind-bendingly brilliant novel.

Murakami's surreal, mind-bending masterpiece: a sci-fi pastiche and a Utopian fantasy novel ingeniously woven together.

A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan. Unicorn skulls and voracious librarians. John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story, post-modern manifesto. All this rolled into one rip-roaring novel, End of the World and Hard-boiled Wonderland is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami’s international following.

Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.

‘A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of contemporary heart and head’ Jay McInerney

‘His fantasies, with their easy reference to western pulp fiction and music, retain a beauty of the mind’ Guardian

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR
  • Published: 26 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529968484
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
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About the author

Haruki Murakami

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon.

In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

portrait photo of Haruki Murakami

Also by Haruki Murakami

The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Birthday Girl
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)
A Wild Sheep Chase
After Dark
Sputnik Sweetheart
See all

Praise for Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

His fantasies, with their easy reference to western pulp fiction and music, retain a beauty of the mind

Guardian

A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of contemporary heart and head

Jay McInerney

Combines a witty sci-fi pastiche and a dream-like Utopian fantasy in two separate narratives which alternate in an interweave of precognition and deja vu

Richard Lloyd Parry, Independent

Here is abundant imagination at play

Sunday Times

Murakami's bold willingness to go straight-over-the-top has always been a signal indication of his genius...a powerful melange of disillusioned radicalism, keen intelligence, wicked sarcasm and a general allegiance to the surreal. If Murakami is the "voice of a generation," as he is often proclaimed in Japan, then it is the generation of Thomas Pynchon and Don De Lillo

Washington Post

He has become the foremost representative of the new style of Japanese writing: hip, cynical, highly stylized, set at the juncture of cyberpunk, postmodernism and hard-boiled detective fiction... Murakami is adept at outrageous wit, outrageous style.

Los Angeles Times