Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

This was the 7th book of Haruki Murakami that I had just finished reading. I am glad It wasn’t the first book because I wouldn’t be able to delve into the complicated world of his stories. The book tells two stories in parallel and only towards the end I understood there was the same hero in both stories and they were going to collide at the end.

That’s how Matt C. Reynolds tells the summary of the book in just three sentences: In this complex pairing of intertwined stories, Murakami takes us to another world as he examines what it means to live a meaningful life. Scattered with intentional ambiguities, the book operates in contrasts — ordinary/sublime, conscious/subconscious, perfect/imperfect — nothing is ever equal. You could choose to live an unexamined life, content and oblivious, but the delight of this book is investigating each metaphor and pausing to reflect.

I recommend you read a little more by opening this link: https://www.mattcreynolds.com/articles/hard-boiled-wonderland-murakami

I am going to make two quilts for this book as I did for two previous. The first quilt is dedicated to Hard Boiled Wonderland and has a unicorn skull. The unicorn skull was given to the hero at the very beginning of the book and for a long time he couldn’t understand the meaning of it ( so didn’t I). Unicorns are creatures that connect both worlds, and as we don’t know if they exsist in reall, we also don’t know what is the world that exists beyond our consciousness.

I used my own hand dyed cotton fabrics and fused applique. The area round the skull I quilted with metallic threads but the photos doesn’t reflect much of it. I forgott to write the sentence before quilting so I added it later, and it is not easy to read but it says Hard-Boiled Wonderland.