Gibson, Murakami, and Chandler?

Some debate the extent of how Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland was influenced by the writings of William Gibson. One Gibson story in particular cited is “Johnny Mnemonic,” one of Gibson’s first short stories, originally published four years before Hard-Boiled Wonderland. But there’s another element that piqued my interest. Mainly, Gibson's fantastically set but bitter and gritty prose shares a few commonalities with one of Murakami’s greatest influences, that being Raymond Chandler.

Gibson was termed the “noir-prophet” of cyberpunk, someone that was not the only forebearer of the genre (Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the film it inspired did as much for the genre as anything Gibson wrote), but one that provided a solid literary foundation. “Johnny Mnemonic” may be the first evidence of this foundation, yet it does contain some elements I'd find Chandleresque. The first is the titular Johnny’s monologue, which the story never strays from, just like Chandler never strayed from Marlowe’s monologue. The second is what Gibson does with this monologue. Johnny gives vivid similes (“It all made sense then, an ugly kind of sense, like bags of wet sand settling around my head.”), typecasts characters with gritty introductory monologues (“I didn’t know very much about Squids, but I’d heard stories, and I made it a point never to repeat them to my clients.”), and gives plenty of semi-lengthy descriptions (“The wood was silver with age, polished with long use and deeply etched with initials, threats, declarations of passion.”). That said, Gibson separates himself from Chandler (and closer to other writers) in a few ways. The first is something Gibson shares with Murakami, that his readers are frequently transformed not just to a different metaphorical world, but one that is radically different in a fantastical or magical sense. The second is something Gibson doesn’t share with Murakami or Chandler, in that his already gritty subject matter can be sometimes taken to radical lengths (To be blunt: I don’t think Murakami or Chandler would spell out a red swastika). - William