Andrew Davis
December 12, 2013
English 181
Professor Kappeler

Postmodernism and Identity in Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World Since the Age of Enlightenment, the ideas of identity and consciousness have been explored by philosophers, psychologists, writers, and more. Since then, the definition of what identity is has changed and evolved, leaving the true, overarching definition unknown. In his novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Japanese author Haruki Murakami explores the ideas of identity and the consciousness through ideas brought up by postmodernist philosophers and psychologists such as Karl Marx, C.G. Jung, and Sigmund Freud and uses them to create characterization, themes, plot, and symbolism.
An important point many notice when reading this book is that the plot is split into two plot lines: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World. Wonderland is set in a modern-esque Tokyo, where the narrator is a Calcutec - a data manager that shuffles data in his head. In this arc, the story revolves around the job the narrator is doing for an old man known simply as the Professor. The other story arc, The End of the World, revolves around a narrator known as the Dreamreader. He is trapped in a walled-in town, where he is told his shadow must be removed and that he cannot leave. He is then made to read dreams from the skulls of unicorns, which live outside the town wall. While the story arcs seem to not connect to each other, the narrator in Wonderland finds out that The End of the World is actually a mental construct put in his head by the Professor when he became a calcutec. It is said that “the black box is the subconscious”(Murakami, 255), and it contains the End of the World. The Professor says the reason it works is because “No two human beings are alike; it’s a question of identity...no two human