Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The City and Its Uncertain Walls: When Perception Fails
Part of: The Deep Reader
Full spoilers for both novels.
The first sentence of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World knows which way the elevator is going.
The second withdraws that knowledge:
“Or at least I imagined it was ascent.”
From there, direction breaks into alternatives. The car may be descending, standing still, going up twelve floors and down three, even circling the globe. Buttons, floor numbers, machinery noise—every instrument that might arbitrate among those possibilities has been removed. What occupies their place is syntax: suppositions multiply, qualify one another, and keep the paragraph in motion while the passenger may not be moving at all.
He soon tries a private method of control. Both hands enter his pockets, each counting a different set of coins; the separate tallies are then brought together. One attempt produces 3,810 yen, the next 3,750. Before a third can decide between them, the elevator doors open. The coins remain the same. It is the count—his practiced coordination of simultaneous streams—that cannot return the same total twice.
In Alfred Birnbaum’s English version, failed perception repeatedly sets the narrator’s language to work. The Town Librarian already makes dream reading collaborative, teaching its hand-and-eye procedure and caring for the Dreamreader when it exhausts him.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls changes the location of the sensory gap. Sensation and knowledge are distributed among bodies and, after the merger, within a being whose parts do not receive the same evidence.
When the missing sound starts talking
On the way to the Professor’s underground laboratory, the narrator hears what seems to be a faucet running full blast. The diminutive comparison arrives before the waterfall itself: sheets of water, drenched clothing, a badly judged step, a kneecap striking rock.
Audible scale and physical scale no longer match. His complaint—“a waterfall ought to have a waterfall’s worth of sound”—is a comic tautology with practical force. The missing roar would have told his body how to move.
On a later descent, where darkness has stripped away nearly everything except the woman’s boot echoes, the same appetite for correspondence becomes more dangerous. The narrator first presses the rhythm into a line of approximate English words.
Dissatisfied, he replaces them with a grotesque phonetic transcription, wonders whether it might be Finnish, hazards a meaning—a farmer meeting an aged devil—and expands that guess into archaic dialogue. The revisions expose every stage of manufacture: sound becomes syllable; syllable receives a conjectural language; the conjecture acquires a road, two figures, and a speaking style.
The invented dialogue ends; then the narrator’s account of the Farmer breaks off on a dash. A slap lands on his cheek. His eyes have closed; his body has stopped; the woman shouts at him to wake and get up.
Once he is standing, she identifies a trap and calls the episode hypnosis; when she ties a rope between them, that explanation remains plausible alongside the formal evidence of his verbal habit. The environment may be exploiting him through an imagination that supplies the form of its own capture.
And so we see how faculty that kept the elevator scene buoyant has now carried consciousness away from the walking body.
Reading before meaning
The Town chapters discipline that improvisatory power through work. Dream reading begins with choreography: hands at the temples of an animal skull, gaze softened toward its forehead, attention held until heat and light emerge.
“Trace that light with your fingertips,” the Librarian instructs.
The command crosses sensory vocabularies without pausing to defend itself. Light can be touched; fingers can follow what eyes admit; a skull’s warmth can carry traces of a mind. Posture, sequence, resistance, and fatigue give this impossible act the density of a learned skill.
Understanding lags well behind technique. With practice, the Dreamreader can process more skulls, yet landscapes, music, and voices continue to arrive as fragments. The limit is bodily—only so many skulls in an evening—and interpretive, since greater fluency does not assemble those fragments for him.
The accordion changes the terms of the work through an exact progression. Four notes lead to five, another chord, then three more; repetition gives the phrase enough shape for the Dreamreader to recognize Danny Boy.
The title releases the melody his memory could not summon directly. The elevator passenger once tried to whistle this tune, producing only a wheeze; in the Tokyo chapter immediately before the Town recovers it, he sings it twice. Its recurrence is procedural: counting, pressing, listening, and repeating recover sequence.
Only then do the skulls glow, and only then can their sparks of heat begin to disclose traces of the Librarian’s mind.
Fragments gathered from the glowing skulls must mingle with the Dreamreader’s own being before he can render them back to the woman whose mind he is trying to reassemble. The Librarian polishes the skulls and demonstrates the placement of hands and gaze, although she cannot read the dreams; when his body gives out, she brings coffee and blankets and rests a hand over his eyes.
When I contains another listener
The old dreams in The City and Its Uncertain Walls are introduced through small corrections.
They are egg-shaped, then “not exactly” egg-shaped; hard and smooth, unexpectedly light, balanced by an asymmetry that keeps them upright.
Enclosed between the narrator’s hands for several minutes, a shell warms, glows faintly, and begins to release its story like a silkworm paying out thread.
Touch establishes the object with increasing precision. Its speech remains subdued, its images incomplete, its meaning beyond the novice reader. The descriptive language can refine the shape more readily than he can receive what the shape contains.
Near the end of the novel, Yellow Submarine Boy asks to merge with him in order to read those dreams. The following evening inventories the familiar: air and lamplight, the kettle, the floorboards, the canola oil. Against that methodical sameness, one altered channel becomes unmistakable. The narrator’s palms still calm the dreams and coax them from their shells. He feels the faint vibration of speech. The voices themselves elude him.
The grammar of collaboration rests on compromised assent. Before the bite, the narrator lies paralyzed, confused, and desperate to sleep while the boy repeatedly insists that time is short. The narration explicitly places his permission in a trance, at the edge of the oblivion he wants. The later ease of we carries this pressure inside it; increased skill never turns the merger into a freely negotiated partnership.
His first account of the change is conjectural: perhaps the boy inside him is hearing them. Then the sentence tries to name the arrangement and corrects itself.
They have “divided up the work of dream reading.”
The next sentence retracts it:
“No, that wasn’t it.”
Their supposed single entity merely uses separate parts of its body. The correction cannot restore equal access. The narrator can report warmth, vibration, and accelerated output, while the content reaches him only as an imagined deposit inside the boy. For one evening, the first person contains a listener from whom it cannot obtain a direct answer while awake.
The first post-merger evening closes with we. That night, while the narrator sleeps, the boy tells him that every part of the dreams reaches him with the clarity of words followed on a page; the narrator alone knows how to lead them from their shells. By chapter 68, the pronoun has become habitual, and their work advances from two or three dreams a night to six or seven.
A Guardian review objects to the novel’s habit of explaining what its scenes have already established, and the extended self-questioning on the day after the merger supplies precise evidence: questions about identity recur without materially changing the situation. The dream-reading sequence qualifies that objection. The narrator corrects himself while trying to name the arrangement; the later pronoun shift alters the narration rather than commenting on it.
The ear, checked again
The novel’s bites conduct a smaller, stranger experiment with the same problem. In the world outside the walls, a wooden doll repeats one word—“More”—and its later repetitions draw the narrator’s right ear closer to its mouth. The word acts spatially before it communicates any message. He leans in, the doll bites, and he wakes with severe pain but no visible mark. At the coffee shop, a second observer also sees nothing. When she rubs the earlobe between her fingers, however, the pain disappears.
Inside the City, Murakami changes the order of those elements. The Librarian sees the right earlobe swollen and discolored before the narrator feels it.
Her question draws his hand to the injury and pain enters awareness; her examination locates the visible wound, while the cold herbal ointment later lessens the ache. Sensation followed an unverified bite in the first world. In the second, another person’s observation summons sensation to a visible mark. Neither woman establishes what caused the injury.
After the boy bites the left ear, both earlobes are clear by morning. The Librarian inspects the right, the left, then the right again. She remembers one visible wound; the narration has disclosed two bites; the body displays neither, and the narrator withholds the second event that might complicate her doubts about the ointment. Across the three versions, pain, mark, witness, touch, and explanation arrive in a different order, changing who knows first and which act has a bodily consequence. The reader can compare the complete series, while the Librarian’s precise right–left–right check cannot recover the event the narrator will not tell her.
I find Hard-Boiled Wonderland the more arresting achievement because failed perception keeps altering the movement of its prose: the invented folktale draws consciousness away from the walking body, and the slap that wakes the narrator also breaks the sentence. The City, on the other hand, too often pauses to explain implications its scenes have already carried.
In the later library, an old dream warms in the narrator’s hands while its voice reaches the boy; we enters the narration, but assent and perceptual access remain unequal.
Sources
Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, Vintage, 1993. The close reading uses chapters 1, 3, 4, 6, 18, 21, 35, 36, and 38. Quotations and verbal details refer to this abridged English edition. Jay Rubin’s unabridged translation, End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland (2024), is outside this essay’s textual scope.
Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, translated by Philip Gabriel, Knopf, 2024. Library and dream-reading passages: chapters 5, 7, 65–68; the bites and examinations: chapters 60 and 63–66.
A. K. Blakemore, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami review—a labour of love”, The Guardian, November 27, 2024. The essay agrees with the review’s objection to repetitive exposition, then distinguishes the later reading and examination scenes by the formal changes they make to perception.
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