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7-NOV-2025 | Excerpt from “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” by Haruki Murakami

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Dan Bogachek
November 07, 2025

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Excerpt from “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” by Haruki Murakami

The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn’t moving at all. But let’s just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I’d gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I’d circled the globe. How would I know?

Every last thing about this elevator was worlds apart from the cheap die-cut job in my apartment building, scarcely one notch up the evolutionary scale from a well bucket. You’d never believe the two pieces of machinery had the same name and the same purpose. The two were pushing the outer limits conceivable as elevators. 🏁

We’re in the narrator’s head. The train of thought feels organic. In part because it stays fixated on this elevator — just like how we’re prone fixate and zone out ourselves.

And even in a novel, take note of that 2nd person “you.” That one detail tints the previous paragraph with the suggestion that he’s talking to someone specific. Or that he intends this to be read. A bit meta.