"No worry, no suffering. It all disappears. Forget about the shadow. This is the End of the World. This is where the world ends. Nowhere further to go."

The last Murakami novel I read was 1Q84 (this was in 2021) and two years later, I'm still hung up on its fictionalized normative bourgeoisie world (or worlds, should I say?) and was expecting nothing less from Hard-Boiled.

Two narratives were presented to us: on one hand we have your typical Murakami Japanese salaryman who was caught smack in the middle of an info-war and on the other hand, a man who was suddenly thrown into a utopia with nothing to do but exist.

The novel tries to blend the politics of dystopia and sci-fi and fantasy, and for me, Murakami wasn't that successful in doing so. First of all, the book had moments where it was too dense for no reason. I LOVE dense novels (which is why 1Q84 is my number one Murakami) but Hard-Boiled was dense just to be dense.

I didn't have the best reading experience with it - it wasn't like your other Murakami where once you step into his world on the very first page, you can't stop turning one page right after the other. I was more interested in the philosophical aspects of the novel than the plot and that is why I still recommend this book.

For me it's as if life was being told through the lens of the subconscious and we have these philosophical tidbits of existence that I wish Murakami spent more time on.

Hard-boiled was still a nice read for me although not as good as the other Murakamis that I have read.