First Lines Fridays || 10/02/2023

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
• Finally… reveal the book!

---

The first lines:

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.

---

Here’s a little hint:

This is a sci-fi, magical realism book by a popular contemporary Japanese writer. It has quite a minimalist cover—or at least some editions do.

---

What’s your guess??

---

The book is:

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

Genre:

Blurb:

A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami’s international following. Tracking one man’s descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.

Goodreads

---

Did you guess right?! Did you read it??