Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

The unnamed first-person narrator is two characters who end up being two parts of the same consciousness. The narrator of the odd numbered, hard-boiled chapters is the level of consciousness that interacts with other people and things in Tokyo. The narrator of the even chapters, the narrator at the end of the world, is a part of the hard-boiled narrator’s unconscious. The narrator at the end of the world is also stripped of his shadow, which is a splitting of his self yet another time; however, the shadow is not written in the first-person, emphasizing its separateness.

The hard-boiled first-person narrator is a 35-year-old divorcee, who works in data coding and transportation, called a Calcutec, for a government-funded company called the System. He prefers the conscious work of data laundering: the encoding of data through splitting the brain into right and left sides. However, he underwent a surgery to be able to also shuffle data, which is a kind of data encoding that takes place in his unconscious mind. He says, “Laundering is a pain, but I myself can take pride in doing it” (115). He also turns out to be unique in that he is the only Calcutec to survive the shuffling surgery because, unknown to him and the scientists at the time, his consciousness was already divided.