Jay Rubin takes us back to Haruki Murakami's world

With the English release of Haruki Murakami’s most recent novel, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” now may be a good time to revisit an old favorite set in the same fantastical world for some deep reading. Out from Everyman's Library and heralded as an “unabridged translation” by longtime Murakami collaborator Jay Rubin, “End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland” provides an immersive, rollicking read that aptly showcases Murakami’s distinctive magic.

Rubin’s new edition restores over 100 pages of text excised from Alfred Birnbaum’s 1991 translation and re-establishes the same word order of the novel’s Japanese title. But existing fans of the novel needn’t worry they missed anything significant the first time around.

“There was no kind of systematic attempt to reshape the novel or to suppress any particular attitude or any particular theme in Birnbaum's translation,” Rubin explains to The Japan Times. “There were just lots of little cuts that added up to a lot of pages. One or two of the cuts were maybe three or four pages long, but most cuts were really just a few sentences at a time.”

End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland, by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin. 488 pages, EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY, Fiction.

The restored text speaks most to Murakami’s style as a writer: his quirky, exhaustive attention to detail when rendering his imaginative world on the page. Rubin’s translation is an iteration most closely aligned to the original Japanese.

Published in Japan in 1985, “End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland" was Murakami’s first work written specifically for book publication and not intended for a literary magazine (serializing novels in such publications before adapting them to a variety of media is a common practice in Japan’s publishing industry). The standalone novel’s widespread commercial and critical success cemented his reputation both at home and overseas, and was awarded the Tanizaki Literary Prize that same year, honoring a work of high literary merit from an established author.

As the title suggests, it’s really two books in one. Murakami alternates chapters with separate narratives of distinctly contrasting settings and genres. The dual storylines take the reader on a surreal, multifaceted journey.

In the “End of the World” narrative, a tranquil city exists behind a 30-foot wall, and its inhabitants live among a herd of golden unicorns whose skulls act as containers for dreams after the beasts die each winter. The narrator, separated from his shadow in order to enter the town, struggles to understand his place in this new environment without any memory or understanding of his previous life. Tasked with reading dreams from the unicorn skulls, the narrator works alongside “the Librarian,” finding himself increasingly drawn to her even though she possesses no heart, like all of the town’s residents.

The “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” strand, set within a futuristic, cyberpunk world grounded in a gritty modern Tokyo, features a cyberwar between two shadowy, corporate entities. Here, the narrator finds himself in the middle of an increasingly tangled web of intrigue. He works as a Calcutec, a futuristic data specialist, hired by an enigmatic genius, “the Doctor,” to shuffle information within his surgically-altered brain to safeguard against intellectual property theft. After leaving the Doctor’s laboratory built under the subway lines and surrounded by sinister, primitive creatures, the Murks, the narrator is confronted by corporate heavies for the secrets he carries. It’s a surreal blend of sci-fi and detective noir as the narrator scrambles to uncover the mystery of what’s inside his own mind.

In addition to the spiraling adventures within each richly imagined world, it's increasingly fascinating to understand how the two narratives connect. At first, the intersections are subtle, seen in recurring ideas like the fickleness of memory or in the repetition of everyday items such as paper clips. Eventually the two narrative halves merge to make a whole, like the left and right hemispheres of the brain working together. It’s a heady experience, deserving of its status as one of Murakami’s best-loved works. Wildly entertaining, it also asks serious questions about the self in society and the unconscious essence of the heart and mind.

Although the novel is definitely a fan favorite, this new translation was not actually intended for commercial distribution.

“When Murakami asked me to do it, he took me by surprise,” Rubin says. “But we were not thinking of a publication. He was thinking of the opening of the new Haruki Murakami Library in Waseda (University). He wanted me to produce an uncut translation that could be on file there, and I thought that was a fine idea."

Rubin’s choices as a translator, like differences in namings — Inklings in Birnbaum's version become Murks in Rubin’s, for example — or subtle word changes and restored sentence construction, does give the new edition the sense of an uncut, unadulterated translation, nearer to Murakami’s original Japanese.

“This was the Murakami novel that totally blew me away, got me involved in Murakami and started everything,” he says. “I never had any problems with the Birnbaum translation. I thought it read well, and it obviously attracted a lot of attention. But I was so in love with that book that I thought of it as something I wanted to translate purely for myself some day, as a thing to do in retirement. There’s nothing like translating a book to make it your own."

It’s also a significant book for Murakami. The “End of the World” narrative shares its origins with his newest novel, as both take their source from a 1980 short story, “The City, and its Uncertain Walls,” the idea of the walled town haunting the author for decades. In Murakami’s introduction of this new edition, he gives some hints about the story’s personal importance. He first explains how he wrote the chapters in “the same order as they appear,” alternating the storylines as they “sparked” toward each other, even though he himself had no idea how the two narratives would eventually connect. “I trusted in the power of stories,” he writes, “and relied on that. It’s a wonderful feeling to have that much faith in stories.”

It’s an engaging, exhilarating story, to be sure, but it’s not without flaws. In many of his works, Murakami writes with great sensitivity of teenage love and burgeoning sexual desires, but the 17-year-old granddaughter of the Doctor, most often referred to simply as the “fat girl,” and her sexual infatuation with the narrator may exasperate even the most loyal Murakami fan and likely repel many others.

Rubin recognizes those few passages are indeed “dated.” However, “I wasn't concerned with trying to fix any part of the work for modern tastes,” he says. “I didn't seriously consider changing or softening anything. I was tasked with producing an accurate representation of what the novel was when it came out."

Taken as a whole, the few jarring moments are ultimately easy to forgive. As a distillation of Murakami’s most enduring themes, the psychological separations of consciousness versus the essence of self, the role of music and love in our unending search as humans to understand ourselves, and just for pure, riotous fun, few of Murakami’s works match the fresh, ambitious verve of this novel.