Audiobook
£0.00
with membership trial

Hardcover
£82.32

Paperback
£6.99

RRP: £9.99 Details

Save: £3.00 (30%)

FREE Returns

FREE delivery Friday, 26 January on your first order to UK or Ireland. Details

Or fastest delivery Tomorrow, 24 January. Order within 14 hrs 55 mins. Details

Select delivery location

In stock

££6.99 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Dispatches from

Amazon

Dispatches from

Amazon

Sold by

Amazon

Sold by

Amazon

Returns

Returnable within 30 days of receipt

Returns

Returnable within 30 days of receipt

Item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund within 30 days of receipt

Read full Amazon return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Add gift options

£2.80 delivery 26 - 27 January. Details

Select delivery location

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Zeercle

Follow the author

Haruki Murakami

Follow

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World Paperback – 1 Jan. 2001

by Haruki Murakami (Author)

4.4 5,083 ratings

See all formats and editions

Save 5% on any 4 qualifying items | Terms

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"£6.99","priceAmount":6.99,"currencySymbol":"£","integerValue":"6","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"99","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"y7iYuROGuhzt7oEbx%2Bp5O94ayidfRebBmkw%2FgSgmRmp0Tro%2BYhNkxBMyKWnnwJtLwV8RV0edb4c6qr5ry1OEjNlbbUrY9GbuUtbfJGt1tHYvnX%2BkdkhsXe3LuEDkFZVm","locale":"en-GB","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"£2.25","priceAmount":2.25,"currencySymbol":"£","integerValue":"2","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"25","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"y7iYuROGuhzt7oEbx%2Bp5O94ayidfRebB3eVSMPoYnY%2F3x4l9aD1ivSNbgp7wEoIDOKU6A0hkLxKNsLsdg74CB81XjW2rZpQzM3DGDbV%2FLEqXTqb7L53MO%2BtSQBPpwPamD%2BQpE%2BuI3hnXM06jDlNIKWfVnvZvwcbJ8fTazK71ButLj8cdRg189iuFZMGomp68","locale":"en-GB","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following.

Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.

Print length

416 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

1 Jan. 2001
Dimensions

19.7 x 12.9 x 2.49 cm
ISBN-10

9780099448785
ISBN-13

978-0099448785
See all details

Frequently bought together

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

£6.99

In stock

Sent from and sold by Amazon.

+

South of the Border, West of the Sun: Haruki Murakami

£6.99

In stock

Sent from and sold by Amazon.

+

£6.99

In stock

Sent from and sold by Amazon.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your basket.

Try again!

Details

Added to Basket

Choose items to buy together.

Haruki Murakami
4,284
Paperback
39 offers from £2.79
Haruki Murakami
2,829
Paperback
31 offers from £1.44
Haruki Murakami
9,554
Paperback
38 offers from £3.52
Haruki Murakami
2,843
Paperback
49 offers from £2.12
Haruki Murakami
1,118
Paperback
35 offers from £1.70
Haruki Murakami
1,051
Paperback
26 offers from £1.02

From the Publisher

Explore the wonderful world of the master storyteller...


	Novelist as a Vocation	Norwegian Wood	Kafka on the Shore	The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle	Collectible Classics
	The new book from Murakami. A unique look at the craft of writing from a bestelling master of storytelling	The haunting love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar	Cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky... A bewitching and wildly inventive novel	A mesmerising, surreal novel - one of Murakami's most celebrated and influential masterpieces	Beautiful new hardback editions of iconic Murakami novels

Product description

Review

His fantasies, with their easy reference to western pulp fiction and music, retain a beauty of the mind ― Guardian

A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of contemporary heart and head -- Jay McInerney

Combines a witty sci-fi pastiche and a dream-like Utopian fantasy in two separate narratives which alternate in an interweave of precognition and deja vu -- Richard Lloyd Parry ― Independent

Here is abundant imagination at play ― Sunday Times

Murakami's bold willingness to go straight-over-the-top has always been a signal indication of his genius...a powerful melange of disillusioned radicalism, keen intelligence, wicked sarcasm and a general allegiance to the surreal. If Murakami is the "voice of a generation," as he is often proclaimed in Japan, then it is the generation of Thomas Pynchon and Don De Lillo ― Washington Post

About the Author

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon.

In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0099448785
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; 1st edition (1 Jan. 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780099448785
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099448785
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 19.7 x 12.9 x 2.49 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 7,687 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 47 in Superhero
- 94 in TV, Movie, Video Game Adaptions
- 380 in Contemporary Fantasy (Books)

Customer reviews:
4.4 5,083 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Haruki Murakami

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

5,083 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

becuille

Superb

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 April 2010

Verified Purchase

To my mind, this is Murakami's best book. And considering the quality of work Murakami puts out, that is really saying something.

The story is divided into two parts: The hardboiled wonderland where our protagonist is immersed in a strange world of minds that are used as encryption keys and dangerous INKlings who live to steal important data; The end of the world, where our protagonist must separate from his shadow and learn to read dreams from the skull of the mysterious creatures who live around the town.

I don't want to give away too much more about the plot because it would spoil it. This is one of those books that you need to read for yourself without knowing too much about it at the start.

Murakami excels at description and writes in two entirely separate voices for the wonderland and the end of the world, painting such a vivid picture of each that it's impossible not to get completely absorbed.

Many of his usual themes run through this book: identity crisis, the id, love/lust, and his old favourite, reconcilling two halves of a whole (I'm sure there's a better way of describing that, but I hope those of you familiar with Murakami's work will know what I mean).

This book has pretty much everything. It's sci-fi, it's fantasy, part noir thriller, sprinklings of a love story. It's exciting, touching, poignant and, in places, very funny.

If you've never read any Murakami before, this is an excellent place to start. If you have, then this book should be your next stop.

It's even more rewarding with re-reads too.

10 people found this helpful

Helpful

Marmite

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 May 2023

Verified Purchase

Not his best. Enjoyed it, but I feel he lost me and the plot half way through.
Will still continue to read his stuff, I do love it.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Like Haibane Renmei? read this. Heck, read it anyway it will broaden your horizons. Good fantasy.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 September 2015

Verified Purchase

I bought this because I heard about it via the Haibane Renmei fandom. It was apparently a great influence on Yoshitoshi ABe in the creation of HR and having seen HR the various parallels did show. HOWEVER as a story this is a remarkable piece of fantasy. The story is two converging stories, told in alternating chapters so you need to keep track of details. Hard Boiled Wonderland is set in Tokyo and concerns the tribulations of a Calcutec - a professional handler of data as he is employed on a strange assignment. The End Of The World is a tale of a stranger in a strange town.. (this is where yu find the HR references)
As I say the two stories converge with the truth coming out in the last few chapters.

Buy it, read it. even in a translation from the original Japanese (which I certainly can't read) it reads well and grips the curiosity.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland - engrossing but...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 March 2023

Verified Purchase

I have become a total fan of Murakami this year - took me long enough to be introduced to him but, since then, I have soaked myself in his (translated) literature.

When reviewing a book that I have purchased, I prefer not to give any kind of a precis of the story - I reserve that for when I am professionally asked to review a book - and so this is simply a highly subjective overview of my experience with this novel.

Having read a number of Murakami short-stories and novels already, I was waiting for the sci-fi element, the fantasy and, above all, the surrealism since this author is able to make even the most mundane of real life events become quite surreal and so question our own view of what we consider reality to be. This novel was no exception and in the first few chapters I found all the hallmarks of what I expect from Murakami.

Whether it was me, or whether other readers had the same experience, it only took a couple of chapters to understand the interconnection of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End Of The World. I felt this totally enhanced the developing stories rather than being a detraction, and the simultaneous stories were always easy to follow and were always engrossing.

I was enjoying every part of this book until around the 3/4 mark when there is a lengthy chapter dealing with the Grandfather "explaining". That was absolutely and totally unnecessary. It was pure sci-fi, for sure, verging on the fantasy, but the entire (almost monologue) could have been edited down to a simple 3 or 4 pages. I felt this chapter totally slowed down the pace of the book since, by that point, I would imagine most readers had already worked a lot of the disparate threads out for themselves and were eager to race to the end to see how the stories concluded. That chapter, I felt, totally spoiled the entire novel, it felt forced and contrived, added nothing that couldn't have been said in just a few short pages. For that I have taken 1 star off my review, even if Murakami had not seen this to be unnecessarily weighty, a publisher's editor should have picked it up.

I hurriedly moved on from that awful chapter to read a couple more and, thankfully, I was able to forget the torture of Grandfather's monologue and get back into the book. I enjoyed the way the drama picked up its pace as it raced towards the end, and I even forgave Murakami for his poorly drawn "girl in pink" who left more questions than answers since she was, essentially, little more than a "guide".

I felt satisfied, I felt that I had read a good Murakami novel, I was already wondering what novel to select next to read, and then came the final pages. To be honest, I was tempted to give this a 1 star rating based solely on the trite, throw-away ending that we only reach in the last few paragraphs. It was an unsatisfactory conclusion to an otherwise excellent book, reminding me of a movie that ends abruptly with lots of questions and you know that there will be a part 2 coming out the following year (that is usually sub-standard). The conclusion to this book, for me, smacked of a writer who had grown tired of his subject and needed closure quickly rather than exploring "the next step".

I enjoyed the book overall, it was worth the effort reading it, it was the kind of Murakami we desire, and it was great that the unnecessary sex scenes he generally litters his books with were minimal here. However, I did not feel "complete" or "satisfied" when I read those final paragraphs. As such, I give this a 3 star rating with 1 star knocked off because of the interminable Grandfather monologue and another star off the rating because of what I felt was a sub-standard and contrived ending that offered no completion to either of the integral stories, perhaps being deliberately left as a "cliff-hanger" but with no volume 2 prepared.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

erika brennan

amazing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 December 2022

Verified Purchase

Amazing book….. absolutely adored it’s weirdness. I have now purchase 3 more books by the same author. I can’t wait to read more.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Jack

A jigsaw puzzle of a novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 January 2023

Verified Purchase

This was my first Murakami novel and it lived up to all the hype I had heard about the author. A great mixing of what appears at first to be two separate stories that come together in a masterful way. Would definitely read again.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

TJ

Make sure you like weird things

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 October 2018

Verified Purchase

This is a very very strange book. It features two different narratives that slowly intertwine in a very clever and exciting way. If you don't like fantasy or sci-fi you simply won't like this book - it's got both in very large quantities but I found it to be more interesting and more readable than many books in either genre. It looks like it's going to be a tougher read than it actually is - it was so enjoyable it has led me to explore a large number of other books by the same author. Won't write a detailed plot analysis as it is likely going to annoy those who haven't read it - but it's great fun as the two story lines come closer and closer.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	AbeBooks Books, art & collectables	ACX Audiobook Publishing Made Easy	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Audible Download Audiobooks	Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations	Amazon Home Services Experienced pros Happiness Guarantee	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities

Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy	Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands	Amazon Warehouse Deep Discounts Open-Box Products	Amazon Business Service for business customers

	Whole Foods Market We Believe in Real Food

Image Unavailable

Follow the author