I was on Wikipedia today when I noticed something pretty neat. Apparently, Haruki Murakami’s novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World inspired Yoshitoshi ABe’s Haibane Renmei doujinshi and anime. Both works feature “a city people aren’t allowed to leave, a wall, a river, a library and a clock tower”. I feel dumb for not noticing the similarities before!
So when I first read Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World for class. I got super excited that the town was so much like Guri. And asked a really silly question of my teacher if this was a common trope in Japanese fiction. And she just kind of stared at me and was like, “No.” Which made me super sad, because I was hoping there’d be a list of books I could read that were about similar towns.