Pre-objective reality and the end of the world

1.1 Objective, purely objective, and pre-objective realities

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World deals with two MMI-based parallel realities, occurring simultaneously in one man’s mind. His subjective existence takes place in the noir reality of Hard-Boiled Wonderland (a surrealistic version of Tokyo). It is the only reality he is conscious of. However, another reality also exists in a small black box that has been hardwired into his subconscious without his awareness of it. It contains a “pre-objective” reality (in that it takes place purely objectively yet without his consciousness of it), an alternate world which he has, unwittingly, named The End of the World. The parallelism of the two worlds is illustrated by the structure of the novel, which switches back and forth – from chapter to chapter – between his pre-objective (in that The End of the World resides only in the deepest, unreachable recesses of his consciousness) and supra-subjective (in that Hard-Boiled Wonderland includes a bizarre, subterranean world with a soundless waterfall and sinister INKlings) realities.

On the other hand, from the reader’s point of view, both worlds are purely objective. John Deely explains pure objectivity thus: “Purely objective being [is] objective, because it exists in awareness as cognized or known; [it is] purely objective, because apart from that awareness in which it is given it has no being at all, no subjectivity constituting it as independent of the awareness” (Deely 2009a: 45). He illustrates this with the following example:

Napoleon differs from Hamlet not only by nationality, but also by once having been what Hamlet never was, namely a subjective existent. Napoleon is like Hamlet in that both also exist as known, exist objectively. There was a time (between 1769 and 1821) when we might have met Napoleon, as the saying goes, “in person” or “in the flesh”. That is to say, there was a time when Napoleon existed subjectively and intersubjectively as well as objectively, whereas he now exists only as Hamlet has always existed, that is to say, purely objectively. (Deely 2009a: 57)

The reader’s purely objective images (due to existing only in the reader’s mind) of these two strange worlds, however, are not based on any reader’s objective/subjective experience of these worlds. They reside only in the reader’s inner consciousness. They are only possible due to the reader’s intersubjective relationship with words in the form of langue. Murakami has used words as building blocks for these worlds, which we experience only in the purely objective sense. He uses vivid metaphors and allusions to novelistic genres we are already familiar with through other books and films (making this book inter-textual, as Eco would say) to create highly fictional, yet relatable, worlds (see Eco 1979). In this way, Murakami gives an air of reality to the two worlds by referencing other purely objective worlds the reader can relate to, despite the fact that the bizarre, outlandish worlds of the novel stretch the limits of the reader’s imagination (for more on this subject see Baker 2012a, 2012b, 2020). In order to create the purely objective worlds in his novel, Murakami plays with the basic premise of what it is to de-sign ^[2] (Seif 2019) a text, taking it to its furthest extreme when dealing with the novel’s subjective world. Deely states:

To create a text is therefore to become aware of the difference between physical surroundings and objective world and to play with this difference, thereby erecting a system of signs at once expressly in consciousness of the difference and enhancive of it. […] To create a text is hence to proceed accordingly in the use of signs freely to structure objectivity in a contour and manner accessible only to a conspecific. […] To create a text is thus a function of musement. (Deely 2009b: 91)

To create the text in question, Murakami takes details from the everyday, subjective world of late twentieth-century urban Japan and, musing upon said details, upends them, twisting them into a surreal, yet still recognizable, world. It is thus that the subjective (within the novel) worlds of Hard-Boiled Wonderland intermesh with the pre-objective world of The End of the World, resonating back and forth in multiple relations of signs.

The novel starts with a scene in an elevator in the world of Hard-Boiled Wonderland. This, however, is an elevator of a sort never experienced in our subjective existence.

The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure; it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn’t moving at all. But let’s just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I’d gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I’d circled the globe […]. Every last thing about this elevator was worlds apart from the cheap die-cut job in my apartment building. […] Most of the gadgets an elevator is supposed to have were missing. Where, for example, was the panel with all the buttons and switches? […] Forget about trying to locate an emergency exit. Here I was, sealed in. No way this elevator could have gotten fire department approval. There are norms for elevators after all. (Murakami 1993: 1–2)

It is a purely objective elevator in more sense than one. It is purely objective in that it existed only in Murakami’s mind prior to him writing the novel, but it is also purely objective in that no elevators of this sort exist in any reader’s Umwelt. It is an elevator of the like we will never experience in our daily existence. It exists on the page solely because it existed in the author’s imagination; it exists in the mind of readers of the book simply because they have read Murakami’s book; because it is an imaginary elevator – with nothing of its like existing in our everyday world – it is purely objective from start to finish.

From the fantastical reality of Chapter One, the novel delves into another fantastical reality, one even more astray from what we experience as the subjective world. This is The End of the World, a reality running parallel to Hard-Boiled Wonderland that also exists only as purely objective for the reader but exists as pre-objective for the protagonist. I call it “pre-objective” because it resides, unknown to him, deep in a subconscious part of his mind. It is a world of blank sameness, inhabited by people who have surrendered their shadows (and therefore their souls and memories) to live alongside unicorns with hair that turns golden in the fall. The “beasts,” as they are called, are vestibules for the townspeople’s forsaken minds. The first paragraph describing The End of the World begins thus: “With the approach of autumn, a layer of long golden fur grows over their bodies. Golden in the purest sense of the word, with not the least intrusion of another hue. Theirs is a gold that comes into this world as gold and exists in this world as gold. Poised between all heaven and earth, they stand steeped in gold” (Murakami 1993: 12). These unicorns are purely objective in the way that Hamlet is. As a culture (among other cultures), we have a collective knowledge of what a unicorn looks like. So much so that we identify “the beasts” as unicorns, although Murakami never mentions that word in his description of the End of the World. It is only in the world of Hard-Boiled Wonderland that a skull given to the protagonist by the Professor (i.e. the mad scientist) is correctly identified as the skull of a unicorn.

3.1 Skulls

In the storyline of the End of the World, the protagonist has been appointed “Dreamreader” and spends his time reading “old dreams” that are stored in the skulls of the dead beasts, which are kept in a library used only for that purpose. The Library is manned by a lovely Librarian who assists him in reading the skulls. After arriving in the unnamed town, the Gatekeeper tells the Man, “As soon as you get settled, go to the Library […]. There is a girl who minds the place by herself. Tell her the Town told you to come read old dreams. She will show you the rest” (Murakami 1993: 38) (In Hard-Boiled Wonderland the protagonist also enlists a female librarian to help him research the skull he has been given in order to identify what type of animal it once belonged to. Both versions of the protagonist fall in love with the librarians as the two worlds begin to merge together). The Gatekeeper continues: “From now on you are the Dreamreader. You no longer have a name. Just like I am the Gatekeeper. Understand?” (Murakami 1993: 39). Now nameless, the protagonist in the End of the World story has already begun losing his identity. Saying that, the Gatekeeper says he will “give [him] a sign” (Murakami 1993: 40) and proceeds to stick a knife into both of the protagonist’s eyes, partially blinding him and making his eyes overly sensitive to the sun. “When you are no longer a Dreamreader, the scars will vanish,” [the Gatekeeper says.] “But as long as you bear this sign, you must beware of light. Hear me now, your eyes cannot see the light of day.” “So it was,” [says the Man,] “I lost the light of day” (Murakami 1993: 40). This loss of daylight becomes a sign that is seen again in Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Trapped in a subterranean landscape, as his time in this world grows to a close, our protagonist longs for nothing more than to read a newspaper by the light of day.

In both universes, the skulls are part of a triadic relationship whereby they are symbols standing in for something other than themselves. In the End of the World, the protagonist reads what turn out to be the town people’s memories, which have been taken from them when they enter the gates and surrender their shadows. The protagonist’s first introduction to the skulls occurs the first night he goes to the Library to read old dreams. The Librarian, who he feels he has known before, places a unicorn skull on the table:

The skull is unnaturally light, with virtually no material presence. Nor does it offer any image of the species that had breathed within it. It is stripped of flesh, warmth, memory. In the middle of the forehead is a small depression, rough to the touch. Perhaps this is the vestige of a broken horn. […] The skull is enveloped in a profound silence that seems nothingness itself. The silence does not reside on the surface, but is held like smoke within. […] There is a sadness about it, an inherent pathos. I have no words for it. (Murakami 1993: 59)

It is from the skulls that our protagonist, as Dreamreader, is to read old dreams. When he touches them, the skulls begin to glow and emit tiny, dancing beams of light. He traces this light with his fingertips, and visions from the old dreams begin to play in his head. Yet they are random, incoherent, and, therefore, meaningless to him. Still, he has a sense that he has seen the skull before: “Looking at the skull beneath her slender fingers, I am overcome with a strong sense of déjà vu. Have I seen this skull before? […] I feel a humming, just as when I first saw her face. Is this a fragment of a real memory or has time folded back on itself?” (Murakami 1993: 60). Here we see the skull as a sign of the Man’s conscious world – or has it come into his “real” world from its presence in the world of the black box wired into his subconscious?

In Hard-Boiled Wonderland, our nameless Calcutec is given a parting gift from the Professor after the laundering of his data has been done. The protagonist takes this gift home, hesitating before opening it, only to find upon unwrapping it that it, too, is a skull: “I cut the tape, careful not to damage the contents of the box. […] I didn’t like the look of it. […] I cleared the table and undid the tape and newspaper. It was an animal skull. Great, I thought, just great. Did the old duffer really imagine I’d be overjoyed to receive this?” (Murakami 1993: 69–71). The End of the World begins to infiltrate into its parallel reality as the unicorn skull begins to affect the protagonist’s “real” world.

The skull was similar to a horse’s in shape, but considerably smaller. From my limited knowledge of biology, I deduced that the skull had been attached to the shoulders of a narrow-faced, hoofed, herbivorous, and not overly large species of mammal. […] I place the skull on top of the TV. Very Stylish. I finished my business […] went into the living room and relaxed on the sofa with a beer to watch a video of Humphrey Bogart’s Key Largo. […] Watching the TV screen, my eyes just naturally drifted up to the animal skull resting on top. […] I stopped the video where the hurricane hits, promising myself to see the rest later, and kicked back with the beer, gazing blankly at the item atop the TV. I got the sneaking suspicion that I’d seen the skull before. (Murakami 1993: 70–71)

With the aid of a librarian with long black hair and an endless appetite, he realizes that the skull must be that of a unicorn. At this point, although both skulls have stirred forth glimmers of recognition in the two different versions of the man, their true significance is something only the reader can perceive – i.e. they are signs that the main characters in each of the stories are but two sides of the same man, existing in two different worlds that mirror each other (strewn-about paperclips are actually the first recurring motif, although it takes the reader longer to truly catch on to this). The above scene, having followed after our introduction to the skulls at the End of the World, symbolizes to the reader the shared duality of the two worlds. The skull is the clue to the reader that the universes exist in parallel. In that sense it is a spiral of semiosis, from the reader’s perspective, that stops only when the book does. It also becomes an indexical sign, once it appears in the Hard-Boiled Wonderland narrative, in that it points to the narrative of the End of the World. As a symbol, it stands for the relations of the skulls to the librarians and the protagonist. Existing (unknown to them) in both worlds, the skull – as a sign-vehicle – spirals, cojoined with our protagonist as the interpretant and the librarians as the significants, in an ever-extending, triadic relation of semiosis.

3.2 Paperclips

As mentioned above, paperclips play a prominent role as reoccurring signs within the two narratives, linking the supra-subjective reality of Hard-Boiled Wonderland with the surrealist world of the End of the World. We first encounter them on the Professor’s desk in the waiting room of his lab, prior to the protagonist going down to the underground lab itself. They are cast about on a grand desk, along with a lamp, an appointment book, and three ballpoint pens. The protagonist takes note of them, but they make no real impression upon him as of yet. When he reaches the Professor’s underground lab, after a treacherous trek amid INKlings to a silenced waterfall, he finds himself in a waiting room identical to the first one, occupied by a large desk, upon which are a lamp, pens, an appointment book, and paperclips. He is later disgusted by the Professor using paperclips to push his cuticles back. After unpacking the skull at his apartment, the protagonist goes to the library in search of books on mammalian skulls. There he encounters the pretty librarian, who goes into the stacks to find a reference book for him. As he waits, he glances down toward the novel she was reading and finds it surrounded by a scattering of paperclips. “Paperclips!” [the man thinks to himself,] “Everywhere I [go], paperclips! What [is] this?” (Murakami 1993: 75). He notes that: “It seem[s] as if a pattern [is] establishing itself” (Murakami 1993: 76), but he does not understand what the relationship between skulls and paperclips might be. He stops on his way back home, buys what is labeled a “lifetime supply” of paperclips and, once back home, places them around the skull, which he has sat atop the television set. Later in the novel, the chubby girl in pink (who, we have found, is the Professor’s overly sexed, seventeen-year-old granddaughter) calls our protagonist back up to the office with the soundless, seamless elevator. She has enlisted his services again; this time to find her grandfather, who has gone missing from his destroyed laboratory. Fearing he has been taken by INKlings or Semiotecs, they search for his whereabouts among the underground caverns of the sewer. The Professor has left them clues in the form of a Hansel-and-Gretel trail of paperclips he has dropped along his path.

“Okay up there? We’re on the right path?” [he asks the girl in pink.] “For the time being at least,” [she replies.] “How can you tell?” [She shines her flashlight at their feet:] “See? Take a look.” [The protagonist looks down at their feet and reports,] “The pitted rock surface was gleaming with tiny bits of silver. I picked one up – a paperclip.” (Murakami 1993: 211)

They find the Professor, holed up in the INKlings sacred lair, where the INKlings are themselves forbidden to enter. In a chapter entitled “Encyclopedia, Wand, Immortality, Paperclips,” our Calcutec leaves the paperclips he has collected with the Professor after the old man explains that they can be used to create a basic repellant against the INKlings to keep him safe while the girl in pink takes our protagonist above ground to live out the last moments of his conscious life.

In the Man’s End of the World existence, paperclips only come up once when our protagonist enters the Library for the first time as the Dreamreader. Entering the room where the dreamreading will be done, he finds it empty, with the exception of some furnishings, a cast iron stove, a clock, and a countertop upon which paperclips have been scattered. If the reader had any doubts at this point, the paperclips found in this version of the library are key indexical signs of the fact that the two worlds are linked. This fact is brought on more forcefully by the feelings the Man feels for the Librarian, which echo his encounter with the librarian in Hard-Boiled Wonderland:

The counter is scattered with paperclips. I pick up a handful, then take a seat at the table. [The Librarian enters.] I look at her […]. Her face comes almost as a reminiscence. What about her touches me? I can feel some deep layer of my consciousness lifting toward the surface. What can it mean? The secret lies in distant darkness. […] Her lips, her broad forehead and black hair tied behind her head. The more closely I look, as if to read something, the further away retreats any overall impression. Lost, I close my eyes. (Murakami 1993: 41)

“Have I met you somewhere before?” [he asks her.] “I have the impression that elsewhere we may have lived totally other lives, and that somehow we have forgotten that time” (Murakami 1993: 42). The paperclips here act as signs of both lost times and his future, first leading the protagonist down into the wonderland rabbit hole of a subjective Tokyo, then leading him onward – via the death of his conscious mind – into his subconscious’s End of the World, with its perpetual time. It is telling that, as a final act before surrendering up his conscious mind to dwell in eternal time, the man hands over the last of his paperclips to save the Professor, the man he now knows put him in the predicament he is in. The world of his Tokyo starts with paperclips and ends with paperclips. While in the never-ending world of his subconscious, paperclips lie at rest – a constant – in the vestibules of his inner sanctum, the Library, where his lovely Librarian awaits him – always his.

3.3 Music

Another motif that winds its way in and out of both stories is the ability to play – or the lack of ability to play – music. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland, as they lie in bed together (although he has blatantly refused to have sex with her), the chubby girl in pink asks the protagonist if he can play a musical instrument. Although he is obsessed with music and plays it as a constant background to his reality there, he answers in the negative. He brings it up one more time when she tells him, on the way to find her grandfather, that she likes him, that he is really “one of a kind” (Murakami 1993: 213). He replies to her, “Thanks, […] but I can’t play any musical instruments” (Murakami 1993: 213). The protagonist listens to music; he does not make music – until a scene toward the very end, right before he leaves existence as he knows it, when he finds himself singing along to Bing Crosby singing “Danny Boy” after making love to the black-haired librarian for the third – and last – time. It is a sign of his farewell to a world that is slipping away from him. He sings it again, becoming “terribly sad.” “Send me letters from wherever it is you’re going,” the librarian says (Murakami 1993: 365). He says he will, “if it’s the sort of place I can mail letters from” (Murakami 1993: 365). Thus his last night in Hard-Boiled Wonderland ends.

At the End of the World, the Man finds himself longing for a musical instrument. He asks the Gatekeeper if there are any to be had in the Town and is sent on a visit to the Power Station at the edge of the woods. The Caregiver of the Power Station, although he cannot play, collects the instruments that people have discarded as they surrender their minds – simply for their physical beauty. The protagonist faces a bewildering array of instruments in various conditions, many of which he cannot remember. (As he is losing his mind, memories are slipping away from him, too. Dreamreading for others, he rids himself of his own memories in an act of surrender to the Town.) There is, however, one instrument that calls out to him. It is a miniature accordion. He takes it with him, bids adieu to the Caregiver, and leaves the woods.

Finding himself back in the Library, after determining that he will not surrender his mind but will instead follow his shadow back to that other world he now has little memory of, he realizes that he cannot leave the Librarian behind, but in her current, mindless state, she cannot go with him. Where he is going, one must have a mind. He racks what mind he has left, trying to determine how to get hers back for her. It seems to be tied in with her faint memories of her mother, who was ousted from the Town to live in the Woods because her mind was too strong. The girl does remember that her mother sang to her, although she can remember none of the songs. At first, the Man can remember only chords, but as he sits in the stacks with her, amid the rows of skulls, she suggests that song might be the key to retrieving her mind: “The accordion is connected to song, song is connected to my mother, my mother is connected to my mind. Could that be right?” (Murakami 1993: 367). The Man explains, however, that “one important link is missing from the chain. I cannot recall a single song” (Murakami 1993: 367). He plays around with some chords, losing himself, thinking: “No, I cannot relinquish my mind.” [He muses,] “I feel almost a … love … toward the Town. I cannot stay in this place, yet I do not want to lose it” (Murakami 1993: 368). His mind begins to soar free, like a bird, over the Town, as a song comes to him:

Presently, I sense within me the slightest touch. The harmony of one chord lingers in my mind. It fuses, divides, searches—but for what? […] After a time, I am able, as if by will, to locate the first four notes. […] They find me; these are the notes I have been seeking. […] The four notes seem to desire further notes, another chord. I strain to hear the chord that follows. […] It is a melody. Not a complete song, but the first phrase of one. […] It is a song, I realize, that I know. Danny Boy. The title brings back the song: chords, notes, harmonies now flow naturally from my fingertips. […] Music brings a warm glow to my vision […]. The whole town lives and breathes in the music I play. […] Everything here is a part of me […]. It is all my self. (Murakami 1993: 368–369)

As he ends his reverie, he finds that the skulls on the shelves have started to glow. He picks one up and says to the Librarian, “There is your mind. […] Your mind has not been lost nor scattered to the winds. It’s here, and no one can take it away” (Murakami 1993: 369). He sends her away for the evening as he begins to trace the images of her mind that emanate from the skull with his fingertips, determined to draw its scattered parts together, so he can take her with him back into the other world before he completely loses all touch with his own mind.