Depending on your religion, culture and personal beliefs, your perception of the ‘afterlife’ may vary. Some believe in heaven and hell, with the entrance to either realms granted or denied depending on the merits we collect on earth. Others take from the scientific paradigm: when we die, we rot and decay into nothingness, that there is no such thing as a soul or an essence that lives on past the expiration of our physical bodies.
Murakami’s Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World takes a different approach. Grounded in the revolutionary research into cognition and the mind, he pulls from various psychological school of thoughts.
The story follows the mundane life of a Data science worker, who as it turns out, his life is not so mundane after all. Despite his constant yearning for an ordinary life, he finds himself, a pawn, tangled up in a much larger and complex scheme orchestrated by an old scientist who is formerly a worker at his company. Specialising in an intricate yet sketchy task referred to as ‘data laundering’, our protagonist becomes an extremely valuable asset to two feuding ends of a technological warfare. He has no choice but to bestow his trust upon the slightly hysterical scientist and the wise-beyond-her-age granddaughter. The man’s story is one which explores the Kafkaesque idea of a modern anomic capitalistic world. His monotonous yet stable life is challenged by his role in the data warfare, where his input may help prevent what is referred to as the End of the World.
The End of the World also happens to be the name of the storyline, paralleled to the one previously mentioned. In this world, the protagonist finds himself in an unfamiliar dystopian place. He makes his way through the world, learns about its workings, socialises with its inhabitants and ambitiously tries to save his ‘shadow’. The setting is calm. Ominously calm. The kind of calm that might evoke distrust, paranoia and curiosity. The protagonist here faces the dilemma of whether he wants to and should leave the place. As the story progresses on, we learn that aspects of this world are elaborate symbolisms to the Data science worker’s reality in the other storyline.
It is revealed to the readers, in a blindsided fashion, that the End of the World is after all not the demise of humankind. Instead, it is referring to the death of the protagonist’s conscious mind.
Here, Murakami brings in different strands of psychological perspectives. There are traces of Freud with the idea of different mind circuits (consciousness and the subconscious), but what really caught our attention here is Murakami's take on the Behaviourist’s cognitive ‘black box’ theory. In the book, the inaccessibility of the ‘black box’ is used to one’s advantage to ‘shuffle’ data. The data is transferred from one known input into a function that is in the ‘black box’ and then out as a perfectly laundered data with no inverse. The professor takes this discovery further as he is able to break into the black box to see one’s subconscious, almost like seeing a movie. And this ‘movie’ is in fact the parallel story we have been reading about, set in the Data science worker’s made-up world, misleadingly referred to as the End of the World. Not only do we ponder about what could be the link between the adventures in ‘Hard-boiled Wonderland’ and this other dystopian/utopian world, we are also led to believe from the name and the actions of the protagonist that the events in Hard-boiled Wonderland will somehow result in the End of the World.
And to a certain extent, that is true.
The Data science man’s stable mind happens to be the only one which is strong enough to withstand the installation of the third circuit as all of the other test subjects ended up dead over time. Here, Murakami dabbles in cognitive psychology and phenomenology. The protagonist is only able to survive the third circuit because his mind could create new but false memories that allows him to make sense of the new world. These memories would act like a bridge which links his current conscious world (first circuit), to the half-conscious that is possibly a variation of Freud’s half-submerged ‘Ego’ or ‘Superego’ ideology (second circuit) and now the third fully subconscious world.
However, the construction of the ‘bridge’ would result in the protagonist gradually losing himself from the conscious world. He would eventually be disconnected from the reality where we would exist alongside the librarian (his romantic interest), the professor and his granddaughter. He faces the question of whether it is such a bad thing to drift off into his subconscious world, which is in an eternal state of perfect calm.
Pulling from Kafkaesque themes, we are aware that there is not much for him in the real world. He leads a mundane and repetitive life of reading, occasional sex flings, data-laundering work and Bob Dylan music. The hippie and mutedly grim sound of Bob Dylan together with his descent into saving the ‘world’ yet not having anyone in the world passionately care for him is poetic and moving. Seeing things from the man’s shoes, we also question whether living in this subconscious may be the best ‘afterlife’ one could ask for.
So as we see the protagonist of ‘the End of the World’ back out of what could be his only chance to escape the subconscious world, a question arises: Is the monotony of the modern world so terrible that it is capable of pushing an individual to choose to live in one’s own fantasy rather than reality?
Perhaps this is why throughout the book, Murakami never once mentioned the name of the protagonist or any of the characters. He intends to critique capitalism and the anomie that results from it. Hence, the protagonist’s life is made to be especially empty: no family, no friends or no relatives he cares about and vice versa.
But most people don’t lead such a life. We all have at least a few strands of connections in our lives that means a lot or at the very least something to us. The connection may not always be organic, sometimes it's obligatory and chaotic (for example, families), but it is impossible to go about life and not interact or form connections with anyone at all.
Therefore, a better and more relatable scenario for all of us would be one of Black Mirror: San Junipero. In Black Mirror: San Junipero, elderly people, often incredibly ill, are given the option to transfer their ‘consciousness’ into this simulated reality set in a beach resort town called San Junipero. Here, the elderly can take on younger personas in this vibrant and nostalgic 1980s world. In this episode, two polar opposites fall in love in this simulated town and one of them (Kelly) struggles to decide whether she wants to live here forever or not.
(Image credit: deadshirt.net)
Spoiler alert: she says yes!
And if you’re familiar with Black Mirror, you’ll know that happy endings are very rare here. With outstanding performances, genius plot twist and a too-good-to-be-true revival of the retro aesthetic, San Junipero is hands-down one of the best episodes of Black Mirror.
This short film explores a lot of things, the main thing being this dilemma of whether we would make the same choice as Kelly: to inhabit in a simulated reality for an eternity after death. From a nihilist standpoint, after we die, things would cease to mean anything. To be able to maintain consciousness or remnant of ‘life’ in another cognitive world might make the idea of mortality more bearable for us.
A pragmatic point to consider would be that, to live in this utopian world, we would lose control of our fate, any thought of free will would be an illusion. After all, it is a simulated reality, manned by real people in the real world. We’re just living in a limbo that can potentially be manipulated according to one’s good or bad desires. This means we could be erased in a blink of an eye, and there wouldn’t be any traces of the inhabitants or anything to remember them by.
Another point to consider would be: is there a point in living for an eternity? In a way, to let our consciousness take on lives in a simulated world or in Murakami’s case in a self-made subconscious world, we dabble in what can be perceived as ‘immortality’. A place where, at first glance, may seem like a blessing, but is it really?
Maybe the beauty of ‘life’ or ‘living’ is in our inability to control or predict its ending as well as the fact that for all we know, this is our only chance at ‘living’ life. There are a lot of things we have yet to find out about the mind or the root of our consciousness, but as Decartes said and we quote: ‘I think therefore I am’. At this very moment, we have the capacity to think, therefore we know we are living and we know we are conscious. But we don’t know how long this would last.
Instead of letting this awareness frighten us, we should let it sink in. This way, every action, experience and connection we make heightens in value.
As Murakami’s protagonist sits back in his car with Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” playing in the background, he embraces his plight with surprising calmness. So, we are left to ask ourselves, in a similar situation, would our passing be just as peaceful or tainted with regrets?
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