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Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
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I hated this book, all five stars of it.
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From the internationally acclaimed Haruki Murakami comes a mind-bending new collection of short stories, all touching beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory...all with a signature Murakami twist. The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world.
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A Murakami novel ruined by the wrong narrator
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Men Without Women
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Performance
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Story
Born in 1951 in an affluent Tokyo suburb, Hajime - beginning in Japanese - has arrived at middle age wanting for almost nothing. The postwar years have brought him a fine marriage, two daughters, and an enviable career as the proprietor of two jazz clubs. Yet a nagging sense of inauthenticity about his success threatens Hajime's happiness. And a boyhood memory of a wise, lonely girl named Shimamoto clouds his heart.
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A River of Unmindfulness
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After Dark
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Here is a short, sleek novel of encounters, set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami's masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. At its center are two sisters: Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny's toward people whose lives are radically different from her own.
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Intriguing book, Poor Narration
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By: Haruki Murakami
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After the Quake
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The six stories in Haruki Murakami’s mesmerizing collection are set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. But the upheavals that afflict Murakami’s characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman.
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A short story collection full of wonder and magic
- By Somewhat Dangerous on 08-24-20
By: Haruki Murakami
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Sanshiro
- Penguin Classics
- By: Natsume Soseki, Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Andrew Koji
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
One of Soseki's most beloved works of fiction, the novel depicts the 23-year-old Sanshiro leaving the sleepy countryside for the first time in his life to experience the constantly moving 'real world' of Tokyo, its women and university. In the subtle tension between our appreciation of Soseki's lively humour and our awareness of Sanshiro's doomed innocence, the novel comes to life. Sanshiro is also penetrating social and cultural commentary.
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This story had no point.
- By icelandicponies on 12-30-21
By: Natsume Soseki, and others
Publisher's Summary
Hyperkinetic and relentlessly inventive, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is Haruki Murakami’s deep dive into the very nature of consciousness.
Across two parallel narratives, Murakami draws listeners into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is a novel that is at once hilariously funny and a deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.
Critic Reviews
“He has become the foremost representative of a new style of Japanese writing: hip, cynical, highly stylized, set at the juncture of cyberpunk, postmodernism, and hard-boiled detective fiction....Murakami [is] adept at deadpan wit, outrageous style.” (Los Angeles Times Magazine)
“Fantastical, mysterious, and funny...a fantasy world that might have been penned by Franz Kafka.” (Philadelphia Inquirer)
“Rich in action, suspense, odd characters and unexpected trifles...[a] provocative work.” (The Atlantic)
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What listeners say about Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Performance
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- Kindle Customer
- 01-08-20
Human Wonder and the End of my Patience.
To be brief, the story s entertaining and insightful. The way he writes women isn't.
17 people found this helpful
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Story
- Amazon Customer
- 07-23-18
Highly recommend
Always love this author, but this book I loved more than most. Melancholy and poetic, it was so engaging. I also loved the narrator. The voice acting for this was perfect and really suited the story.
17 people found this helpful
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- Beemos
- 03-10-19
Very cool.
Long-winded, yet simultaneously awesome. Reminds me of the first time I took acid. A must read.
13 people found this helpful
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- Suleman Abbas
- 01-06-20
Yet another Mesmerizing adventure murakami took me on
I have to admit that in the beginning the book started as less interesting as other murakami books that I have read but it moved along, I became more and more absorbed.
Compared to the other books, it also seemed more clear to me and the abstract ideas made more sense. But the greatest beauty, as with all other murakami works, was the way it was told and the web was weaved. Just beautiful.
The performance was pretty great too. Kirby's voice, in my opinion, fits murakami's writing style very much.
I now look forward to my next Murakami adventure.
6 people found this helpful
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- Lmon
- 01-25-20
so glad this book is over
the book started out great, interesting, compelling "page turner" then hit a wall of boring that never ended. he goes into details about brain waves, mental circuitry, lines of consciousness, neuron pathways and mind programming into a lengthy depth that made me glaze over. I find myself thinking about anything except what was being narrated and i had to rewind it like 3 times just to say off it, and I'm not going to understand this and i just wanted to get to the end.
5 people found this helpful
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- Stephen Barr
- 12-26-19
Very enjoyable
This is a well written and well read book. A friend suggested this is the right place to start with Murakami and I will definitely be reading or listening to more of his books. The performance is great the characters are well constructed and the narrative builds to a satisfying conclusion. Highly recommended
5 people found this helpful
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- McCrackin
- 09-28-21
It’s a shame he can’t write women
I loved everything about this book, except for the ridiculous way he writes women and the borderline pedophilia inherent in writing a literal child trying to seduce a 35-year-old man. Is it so hard not to be creepy and weird about women and girls? To write them as more than lust and body type obsession? It was enough to repeatedly take me out of what was otherwise an incredible story.
3 people found this helpful
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- don m
- 02-14-20
An Early Murakami Gem
Like all of his masterpieces, get ready to wish this audiobook last you an eternity.
3 people found this helpful
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- Kelly Caffey
- 01-22-20
Well narrated, but barely a story
This was a struggle to listen to even though I'm a Murakami fan generally, because you expect the story to go somewhere or wrap up into an allegory and neither of those actually happens. Pretty sad about listening to this whole book.
3 people found this helpful
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- Damien
- 08-03-18
phenomenal and mysterious
I loved the story. I particularly enjoyed the split plot lines . Would recommend to any serious reader
3 people found this helpful