Murakami’s Calcutec-Semiotec Dichotomy

The mirror-like interplay and tension between the System-affiliated Calcutecs and the Factory-aligned Semiotecs is another example of the cerebral, insular-minded emphasis that our class has encountered in a number of the texts we’ve read in class. In novels such as “Snow Crash” and “Neuromancer” and the film Ghost In The Shell, key significance was given to the faculties and characterization of the mind. Concepts such as far-reaching neural and cyberbrain networks made the brain the center of importance, and in Murakami’s “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World”, not only is information king, but information stored and dealt with mentally is a vital part of the world.

What is described in the text is an economic market heavily established around mental data: “Semiotecs traffic illegally obtained data and other information on the black market, making megaprofits. …Information is clean and information makes money” (Murakami 33). This exchange of data is simultaneously centered in the conflict dynamic between the Calcutecs and Semiotics, who in turn represent the larger conflict between the System and the Factory. The “quasi-governmental status” of the System means that this information-worship held aloft by Calcutecs and Semiotecs is much larger than just a petty war for profit amongst organizations. Murakami’s world is mired in “the sea of information” that The Puppet Master of GITS describes.

What Murakami accomplishes with this novel, is the providing of further evidence that inward-looking scope is just as expansive as the outward-looking one, and with technology’s uncompromising capacities, human concerns are at once proliferated and revamped.

 

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