die of cold during the winter. It gradually becomes evident that this Town is the world inside the subconscious of Hard-Boiled Wonderland's narrator (the password he uses to control different aspects of his mind is even "end of the world"). The narrator grows to love the Librarian while he discovers the secrets of the Town, and although he plans to escape the Town with his Shadow, he later goes back on his word and allows his Shadow to escape the Town alone. The two storylines converge, exploring concepts of consciousness, the subconscious or unconscious mind, and identity. In the original Japanese, the narrator uses the more formal first-person pronoun to refer to himself in the Hard-Boiled Wonderland narrative and the more intimate in the End of the World narrative. Translator Alfred Birnbaum achieved a similar effect in English by writing the End of the World sections in the present tense. Popular music and jazz figure prominently in many of Murakami's stories. The title Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World contains a reference to the 1962 pop hit "The End of the World," written by Arthur Kent and Sylvia Dee and sung by Skeeter Davis. Davis's version reached No. 2 on both Billboard's Hot 100 chart and Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart. A cover version released in the US by Herman's Hermits in 1965 reached No. 1 in that country as the B-side of "I'm Henry VIII, I Am." The reference to "The End of the World" is obvious in Japanese editions of the novel because an epigraph quotes from the lyrics and credits for the song are appended at the end. 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. Given that lost love is one of Murakami's major themes and that Murakami likes to play metafictionally with such allusions (the credits at the end of the Japanese edition of the novel also contain a spurious reference to a book translated into Japanese by one "Makimura Hiraku" -- an anagram of Murakami's name), the removal of the explicit reference to the song is puzzling. Characters In both narratives, none of the characters are named. Each is instead referred to by occupation or a general description, such as "the Librarian" or