ABSTRACT
Without the necessity of placing the Murakamis in the ranks of "serious" writers, their works may perhaps yet be understood as something more than designer products for the mass of mindless reader-consumers. The opening scene of Murakami Haruki's ambitious science fiction novel Sekai no owari to hadoboirudo wandArando finds the protagonist emerging, disoriented, from an elevator into a winding, blind corridor that seems to go on forever but lead nowhere. The potential danger in such optimism is that the writers are constructing a "remembered" future for a country that has, in the minds of many, yet to fully deal with the very real memories of its actions in Asia during the 1930s and 1940s. The protagonist of the "Wonderland" narrative line of Murakami's novel is a midlevel functionary in the employ of the System who is adept at "laundering," a process by which the System's agents encode vast amounts of data into their brains for safekeeping.
