Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド, Sekai no Owari to Hādo-Boirudo Wandārando) is a 1985 novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

The even-numbered chapters deal with a newcomer to "The End of the World", a strange, isolated Town, depicted in the frontispiece map as being surrounded by a perfect and impenetrable wall.

The narrator is assigned quarters and a job as the current "Dreamreader": a process intended to remove the traces of mind from the Town.

Translator Alfred Birnbaum achieved a similar effect in English by writing the End of the World sections in the present tense.

For some reason, however, neither epigraph nor credits are included in the English translation, which obscures the musical reference and has led one critic to mistakenly identify the song as originating with the Carpenters in the 1970s.

[citation needed] The image of losing one's shadow when approaching the end of the world is found in Knut Hamsun's 1898 novel Victoria.

[citation needed] The theme of the human brain storing encrypted data is found in William Gibson's 1981 short story Johnny Mnemonic, but in interviews Murakami says this was not an influence.

[13] Kirkus Reviews wrote that it was "One of those rare postmodern novels that is as intellectually profound as stylistically accomplished, by a writer with a bold and original vision.

[17] A Companion to Crime Fiction describes Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World as a 'metaphysical detective story', comparing it with Kobo Abe's Inter Ice Age 4 and Andrew Crumey's Mobius Dick, 'linking apocalyptic science fiction and metaphysical detective/mystery stories through antiphonal narratives, alternating "science" and "mystery" to yield reciprocal modes of displacement.

'[18] In The New York Times, Paul West found that the novel needed "more emotion" and "fobs us off with generics and categories" rather than seriously developing "his thematic material".

[19] The End of the World narrative was one of the inspirations for Yoshitoshi Abe's Haibane Renmei, originally produced as a dōjinshi manga and later adapted as an anime series.