"Hard-Boiled Wonderland"

[trinabobina]

-- I just posted this in the Literary thread, but I brought it down here to get more response...lock 'er up if you need to...


Okay -- here's a fantastic book that has some great connections to our Lost... "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" by H. Murakami. If you haven't read it, pick it up. Here's a synopsis I borrowed from the internet...(the underlines and bolds are mine)

...One storyline follows the Calcutec (main character) as his job, past and future turn out to be far more complex than he imagined, while the other unfolds in the parallel fantasy world of The Town, an isolated place of unicorns and lost selves, surrounded entirely by a threatening, mysterious Wall (the island).

The Calcutec's latest assignment draws him deep beneath the city (the hatch), into the hidden sanctuary of a former government scientist (Danielle) who specializes in the rewiring of human minds. In an information war between the government (The System) and private industry (The Factory), what could be a more effective way of protecting data than by shuffling it through the utterly unique pathways of a human brain? The Calcutec happens to be the sole remaining survivor of a group of human guinea pigs (a common Lost theory)on whom such experiments have been conducted, and he finds himself threatened on both sides by the System and the Factory, and forced to trust the eccentric scientist and his granddaughter.

In the Town, we follow the story of a lost, confused narrator who doesn't know why he's here, or what his purpose may be. The townfolk provide vague guidance, but offer no clues to his identity or origin.
* * * * * * * *

Ultimately, the two story lines converge in the end. It is truly a master work of sci-fi/fantasy. The jacket states it's a meditation on the nature and uses of the mind. I'm going to re-read it this week (I read it over ten years ago) and do some more comparisons. Anyone else hear read it/heard of it? It was all the rage to read when I was in college (back in the day).

[azteclady]

trinabobina,

Despite appearances to the contrary, we don't lock theories indiscriminately - we lock threads that are duplicates (triplicates, quadrupicates, etc), of questions asked and, in many cases, answered months ago. And we do that in order to try to control the use of bandwidth and therefore, the cost of the board.

Yours is a completely new avenue of exploration, and a perfectly legitimate one at that.



Beto
Read the Welcome (http://p073.ezboard.com/flosttheunofficalforumfortheabcseriesfrm31) forum first, PM me second

[trinabobina]

I know it's not an indiscriminate lock-up policy...being a newbie, I wasn't sure if this had been discussed back in the early days of Lost. I'm glad it hasn't. I'm posting another review of the book, to further illustrate the connections, before I read it again -- and come up with connections on my own.

The ``hard-boiled'' hero, 35 and divorced, is a man of possessions--a collection of imported whiskeys; interests--old American movies and cooking; but no emotions. Which, coupled with his brilliant work on computers, makes him the ideal candidate for a mysterious aging scientist holed up under the sewers of Tokyo. Here, protected by a waterfall and by flesh-devouring creatures, the INKlings, from the two competing information organizations that control everything in the country, the scientist has devised a perfect secret code by operating on the brains of selected computer workers. The hero, summoned to the scientist's lair, is presented with a unicorn's skull and told of a project called ``The End of the World.'' Alternating between these encounters with the scientist, the scientist's granddaughter, and bully-boys bent on finding out what he knows, there is the story of the ancient walled town at the end of the world. In this home of one-horned beasts, a young man arrives, is separated from his shadow, and is set to work interpreting the dreams of the skulls in the library. The two worlds increasingly connect and at the end fuse, with the hero, though certifiably dead, for the first time morally and emotionally alive and resistant to the society's pervasive control of the individual. One of those rare postmodern novels that is as intellectually profound as stylistically accomplished, by a writer with a bold and original vision. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--

And, here are some of the chapter headings...
The Colonel, A Map of the End of the World, Dreamreading, The death of the Beasts, Power Station, Hole, Escape, Birds, Musical Instruments -- can you see some connections already? Back in the early nineties, this was the hot book on campus...it won the Japaneze equivalent to the Pulitzer...not too far-fetched to think that J.J. has read this one...

[clone11]

Fascinating, hopefully more people who've read the book can contribute. I'd like to hear more.

[drabauer]

I didn't read that Murakami, but a friend gave me The Wind-up Bird Chronicles, which was terrific but really ambiguous in just the way that Lost is. Since my memory is fuzzy, I'll edit the Amazon blurb to indicate just what I mean by that (ambiguous) statement.

Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.

Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

The cat and wife's disappearances are never fully explained, nor is his the hero's growing obsession with the characters he meets, all of whom are strange, and all of whom have a "gift" of some type that is never fully explained (psychic abilities, etc).

The Lost connection: the characters -- all strange yet 'gifted' -- are thrown together by chance, yet by the end of the novel the reader assumes that fate has brought them together. Strange juxtapositions, coincidences and occurences (a woman he doesn't know keeps calling our hero) are not all explained, but you feel by the end that you know everything you need to because there is emotional closure, and the main characters are fully fleshed out. Although it takes place in Tokyo, most of the novel occurs in alleys, etc., in a kind of netherworld Tokyo, and there is a journey in the middle that takes the hero into the nation's past, as it were.

If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight.

Well that doesn't say much, other than that the superficial life of our hero (he is unemployed at the beginning, and is not big on thinking ahead) is undone by the people he meets and the adventures he undergoes, and Toru has to confront issues he never previously thought about (very Boone-like). Oh, and we can't forget the Wind-up Bird itself, which is a metaphor that becomes reality in the novel: an imaginary cyber-bird that brings several plot threads together.

The funny thing about TWUBC compared to what trinabobina says about the Hard-Boiled Wonderland is that it is not overtly sci-fi or fantasy. I would consider it a peculiarly Japanese branch of magical realism wherein the mundane is crossed with just enough far-out elements to constitute a kind of waking dream-novel.

Wow, that was a lot considering I read it 12 years ago or more!

[trinabobina]

Pretty impressive memory, Drabauer! I had heard about the wind up bird, haven't read it yet. I did read a collection of his short stories -- something with "elephant" in the title. The magical realism is pervasive throughout Wonderland -- it's also hailed as early cyber-punk, though I don't know that I agree with that. I'm at a conference this week (yawn) so I'll have plenty of time to re-read it.

I may have to pick up Bird, too.