Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

I picked up this book from a Reddit comment saying it is Murakami's most signatory work. Having only read 1Q84 prior to this, I expected a tinge of magical realism plastered here and there along a banal plotline. The book pleasantly surprised me on that front.

In the real world, there is a typical Japanese worker; maybe not so typical, since his work is mind encryption. In the magical world, there is a man whose shadow got sundered from him by the Gatekeeper of the Town. The mind encrypter received a job from a mad professor to perform memory obfuscation. The shadowless man became the Dreamreader, evoking dreams from animal skulls everyday. Some clashes happened, some trouble arose, some memory regained, some secrets revealed, and then it was the end of the world.

The real world in which our mind encrypter lives has surrealist elements, and they are quite direct. They are described through the first-person view as a matter of fact, but somehow it leaves quite an impression on me. It is the real world, occupied by real people, but there is always something that is off, detracting my mind from visualizing it. It is an enjoyable feeling.

The book poses philosophical questions on the relationship between memory and identity. I did not particularly engage with this theme, nor do I warrant the sci-fi details much interest, but I do believe the book is invested in those areas, if that is your cup of tea. For me, I read the book in a hazy state of mind, haphazardly immersing myself in the world of dreams and shadowless townpeople, and I think it is how the book is intended to be experienced.