Blog post #5

 
“Johnny Mnemonic” by William Gibson and Hard Boiled Wonderland by Haruki Murakami share some striking similarities. Both protagonists seem to have technological capabilities housed within their brains, and they sell their services to others. The world they live in is unlike any world we live in now, both having become technologically complex with humans, and in Gibson’s world animals, becoming cyborgs. In each story, information has been commodified, and using that information to extort others seems to be a free for all in both cases. In both society has been stratified in terms of who has access to the most advanced technology, though even the lower castes seem to have pretty high tech access. In Gibson, power is held primarily by the Yakuza which long ago absorbed all the other gangs, though other groups exist on the outskirts of society. Murakami’s world on the other hand seems to be more bureaucratic, comparing the system to the power granted to attorneys to market their services, while anyone who works without these qualifications is cast into the realm of the black market, otherwise known as “the Factory”. Both stories revolve in mystery and moving parts, while the protagonists work to either satisfy or evade the powerful ‘other’, the System or the Yakuza respectively. However, in “Johnny Mnemonic”, we find the protagonist himself never has to deal with Yakuza directly, and he settles into an uneventful but fruitful life under the radar. Interestingly, he discusses how it is impossible not to leave a trail in his world, yet he manages to find a way of living in which nobody seems bothered to come find him. On the other hand, in Hard Boiled Wonderland, the calcutec diligently does his job but is stunned by the juxtaposition of bureaucratic influence and relative scattered affect of his new employer. We are first introduced to the employer’s granddaughter, seemingly mute, and we end the story with the grandfather realizing he had made her mute in an experiment and accidentally forgotten to reverse the effects. The protagonist’s reaction to this is simply: “Oh.” In this interaction, we see some of the anticlimactic deadpan which came to reign in “Johnny Mnemonic”. Each story leaves a lot of explanation lurking in the shadows, with mysterious spies abound and action which seems to lead nowhere in particular. Both create an entirely novel futuristic sci-fi world, and yet each narrative seems to lead us toward a distinct feeling of mundanity. I think Murakami, and perhaps Gibson, probably did this on purpose, taking the sci-fi format but inputting their own commentary, as we have seen in the past with Murakami and hard-boiled detective fiction. 

Natalia