La fine del mondo e il paese delle meraviglie

A professional data-scrambler, called a Calcutec, takes a private job from an elderly scientist and finds that experiments have left a second consciousness running inside his head. This storyline, set in a near-future Tokyo of rival agencies and underground creatures called INKlings, alternates with a quieter one: a man enters a walled town at the end of the world, gives up his shadow, and takes a job reading dreams from old unicorn skulls. As the two plots converge, Murakami shows how memory, identity, and the heart relate to each other.

The novel rewards patient readers who like speculative fiction that works as philosophy as much as as plot. Fans of Borges, Philip K. Dick, or Murakami's later Kafka on the Shore will find a key early work here.

Deep, inward-looking, open-ended and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

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