A Long-Awaited Comeback

From the Land of the Rising Sun came a battalion of top-caliber writers whose works, across centuries, have swept the world and revolutionized and changed the landscape of the literary world. Without a doubt, Japanese literature is one of the most influential literatures. It has produced one of the world’s first novels, Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s 源氏物語 (Genji monogatari; trans. The Tale of Genji). Japanese literature boasts three awardees of the Nobel Prize in Literature, considered the highest distinction for a literary career: Yasunari Kawabata (1968), Kenzaburō Ōe (1994), and Kazuo Ishiguro (2017). Flanking them are equally highly heralded writers such as Natsume Sōseki, Yukio Mishima, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Yūko Tsushima, and Fumiko Enchi. Their works are lauded in their native Japan and with the growing interest in translated works, more of their older works are made available to readers worldwide.

In the contemporary, one of the most globally recognized and accomplished Japanese writers is Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹, Murakami Haruki). Who has not heard of Murakami? His works which span novels, short story collections, and works of nonfiction are ubiquitous. Even those who are not devout readers of Japanese literature would have already encountered him or his works through casual discussions in literary circles or book clubs. His works explore a plethora of subjects, with some delving into his personal life. The critical acclaim that his works – such as Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, and Norwegian Wood, among others – and his entire oeuvre accrued over the years made Murakami a part and parcel of conversations related to the Nobel Prize in Literature. With a literary career that spanned nearly five decades, Murakami has received several accolades. Recently, he received the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement and was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer.

With careful precision, Murakami crafted an enviable oeuvre that several literary pundits have adjudged as one of the best among living writers. His ascent to literary stardom started in 1979 with the publication of 風の歌を聴け (Kaze no uta o kike; trans. Hear the Wind Sing). What made the book more interesting was how it was conceived. The idea for the story struck Murakami while he was watching a baseball game between his favorite team Yakult Swallows and Hiroshima Carp at Meiji Jingu Stadium. The rest, they say, was history. In 2023, he made his long-awaited full-length prose comeback with the publication of 街とその不確かな壁 (Machi to sono futashika na kabe) in the spring. It was met with fanfare because it has been five years since his last novel, Killing Commendatore, was released. Murakami’s fifteenth novel was eventually made available to Anglophone readers with a translation by Philip Gabriel in November 2024 as The City and Its Uncertain Walls.

Indeed. Loneliness is extremely hard. Whether you’re alive or dead, the wasting away, the pain is exactly the same. But even so I still have the strong, vivid memories of having loved someone with all my heart. A feeling that seeped into the palms of my hands and still remains. Whether you have that warmth or not makes all the difference in the way your soul remains after death.

Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Divided into three parts, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a return to the fabled world of the Murakami lore. Unsurprisingly, the story is narrated by an anonymous male character who was recounting the story in the contemporary. The story commenced when he was seventeen and had recently fallen in love with a sixteen-year-old girl after they both won an essay writing contest. The girl – who was also anonymous – could not reciprocate his feelings because, as she explained to him, her “real” self was residing in a city beyond a wall: The real me lives there, in that town surrounded by a wall. The me here with you now isn’t the real me. It’s only a stand-in. Like a wandering shadow. Despite this, his yearning and desire for her kept growing. Together, they built a vivid vision of the city from the fragments of their imagination. A replica of the city soon materialized, with all the intricacies written down by the boy. The city where her real self lives was surrounded by a wall, hence, the title.

In the first section, the narrator oscillates, in short chapters, between his memories in the real world and his experiences in the mystical world, in the titular walled city. In the dream world, the narrator as a middle-aged enters the walled city. However, his shadow must be separated from his physical body. In the walled city, time did not exist and unicorns roamed the meadows. The narrator’s job was to read old dreams at the library. Meanwhile, in the real world, the narrator recounts the progression of his teenage romance. It was revealed that the young woman is afflicted with deep clinal depression that has haunted her all her life. The young man had no inkling of how to support her but still, he tried. They wrote letters whenever they could. Unfortunately, one day, the letters stopped arriving. She disappeared, leaving him heartbroken. The narrator eventually wakes from his dream of the walled city, thus, commencing the second part.

The narrator, however, still could not move on from his lover even though he tried several times to pick up the pieces of his life. Working for a book publisher, he tried to get into a relationship. However, everything was for naught. Apart from his memories of her, the narrator was also haunted by the city with the walls. This longing prompted him to resign from his mundane job and take on a job at a local library in an obscured part of the country, in a town nestled in the mountains of Fukushima prefecture; he began dreaming about a library in the countryside after resigning from his job and even sought the assistance of his friend. The library has an interesting story itself. Because of the largely agricultural area, the original town library was supposed to be torn down but a businessman fought to keep it. After getting an invitation for an interview, the novel’s hero made his way to the town where he was interviewed by the recently retired head librarian, Mr. Koyasu. Mr. Koyasu was barely surprised by the applicant’s motivation for moving to the countryside: peace.

After being accepted for the job, the narrator immediately moved into the town and immersed himself in its routine. The library staff, particularly the librarian Mrs. Soeda, helped the narrator adjust to his new environment. Life flowed at an unhurried pace. However, not everything was as it seemed. Mr. Koyasu was an enigma but through Mrs. Soeda, the narrator learns more about the library’s founder. The narrator would also encounter other characters in the village who piqued his interest. A strange boy visits the library every day. He does not attend school but instead reads voraciously at the library. He also stands out because of his Yellow Submarine. Another boy named M** approached the narrator suddenly and provided him with a map of the walled-in town. This naturally left the narrator surprised. What was even more surprising was M**’s desire to go to the walled city and be a Dream Reader.

I gathered my strength, got rid of any doubts, and trusted my heart. And my shadow and I passed through what should have been a thick brick wall, like we were swimming through it. Like passing through a soft layer of jelly. An uncanny, incomparable feeling. That layer seemed made of something between the material and the immaterial. Time and distance didn’t exist there, and there was a unique sense of resistance to it, like grains of different sizes mixed together.

Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls

On the surface, the novel’s premise is reminiscent of an earlier Murakami novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985). Long-time readers of Murakami’s works would immediately recognize the parallels between the two books even without reading the author’s Afterwords in The City and Its Uncertain Walls. Apparently, the original manuscript for Murakami’s latest novel was a short story published as early as the 1980s. Murakami tried working on expanding the short story but he soon felt empty. As an alternative, he reshaped the original manuscript and derived the aforementioned Hard-Boiled Wonderland. While the book inspires nostalgia for Murakami’s earlier works, The City and Its Uncertain Walls stands out on its own. After all, this is Murakami universe where he is the only one who sets the rules. Rarely are things predictable and straightforward.

The novel is a return to familiar Murakami literary territory. The main character is the stereotypical Murakami hero. He has become a drifter as he yearns for a long-lost love. Among the novel’s loftiest achievements was the tender and affectionate relationships he built with those he met, starting with his teenage love. Equally affecting was his adult relationship with the female owner of a coffee shop. His friendship with Mr. Koyasu was also riveting. However, the novel is propped with hauntings, particularly where memory is involved. The most prevalent of these hauntings was the narrator’s memory of his teenage love affair and of the walled city. Many can relate to the narrator and his plight. For years, his unfulfilled love not only haunted him but hindered him from finding love. In a way, the narrator’s move to the countryside was a break from the chain that has long shackled him to the ground.

Mr. Koyasu was the novel’s beacon of wisdom. He was cognizant of the correlation between memory and the subsequent impact it has on our life choices and decisions. On top of this, the novel explores the importance and nature of time. Interestingly, the walled city had clocks sans hands, allegories for timelessness: It wasn’t a clock that told time, but a clock that showed the meaninglessness of time. Murakami working on the novel during the height of the pandemic was also a nod to time. He finally found the right time to work on a piece that he had lodged in the back of his mind for decades. It is, in a way, a reminder to all of us that will always be a time to work on our projects, especially those that we are passionate about. For the novel’s narrator, he might have been frozen in time but time eventually granted him the opportunity to rebuild his life, to make something of it. While the original manuscript was set in the 1980s, the novel was updated to the tune of the contemporary.

Like in his other works, the lines between what is real and what is fantastical are blurred. The narrator has to learn how to distinguish between the two worlds. The walled city was a metaphor for the mystical world and the wall was the boundary that separates it from reality. The city also transforms itself into a metaphor for death, a subtle and germane subject the novel explores. The confiscation of the shadow upon entry to the city is symbolic. The shadow will eventually die if it does not leave the city. The wall looms and breathes its own life. Even the narrator had interactions with the wall: it towered there imbued with its own will, its own unique life force. And the town was completely enveloped in its hands. As the story moves forward, it is also palpable how the walled city was a place for people who have lost something. The walled city is for misfits. Its boundaries constantly shift, echoing the narrator’s struggles to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Every time I see rain falling on the sea a certain emotion washes over me. Probably because the sea eternally–or at least for a period of time that’s nearly eternal–never changes. Seawater evaporates and forms clouds, and the coulds rain, in an endless cycle. In that way the water in the sea is replaced again and again. Yet the sea as a whole doesn’t change. The sea is always the same sea. An actual substance you can touch, yet at the same time a pure, absolute concept. What I might feel when I watch rain falling on the sea is (probably) that sort of solemnity.

Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls

M**’s brother provides a different dimension. He tells the narrator that he thinks the wall surrounding the town is the consciousness that creates you as a person. The town as a metaphor for the subconscious will again ring a bell of familiarity for readers who are familiar with Murakami’s oeuvre. However, it is also because this is Murakami literary landscape that we are never entirely sure what the walled city or other allegories really stand for. This familiarity and unfamiliarity is complimented by familiar Murakami elements. Familiar images of pools in the ground, wells, and holes riddle the story. Sometimes, they are passages between worlds or dimensions in the same world. Like in previous Murakami works, jazz and music permeate the atmosphere. Ironically, the novel was bereft of Murakami’s intriguing characterization and treatment of female characters.

Apart from memory and time, identity and the true self are seminal subjects that the novel explores. After all, the wall separating reality and fantasy is also the same wall that separates our true selves from other dimensions: Sometimes I feel like I’m the shadow of something, of someone. The young woman the seventeen-year-old narrator fell in love with was also conflicted because she felt her real self was locked up in the walled city. The novel was also a paean to libraries and books. The library is a safe haven not only for the narrator but for individuals who do not conform to society’s standards such as the case of the young boy with Yellow Submarine parka. It gave the narrator and the young boy purpose. For the narrator, it was a break from his period of being adrift.

However, it was not only Hardboiled Wonderland that the novel owes credit to. The library is reminiscent of the library in Kafka in the Shore. The narrator – a student misfit – is akin to the narrator of Norwegian Wood. The plotline involving the disappearance of the narrator’s young love reminds us of Sputnik Sweetheart. All of these underline how Murakami was unapologetically borrowing elements from his earlier works. What bears down on the novel’s overall impact is the repetitions where the characters state and restate details of particular events. This prompts the characters to ruminate but their ruminations are rarely conclusive. There was a palpable lack of finesse in execution, exacerbated by a tendency to highlight the novel’s magical realist elements. The story meandered, plodding the promises of the story.

Despite its flaws, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a welcome addition to Murakami’s extensive and highly-heralded oeuvre. On the surface, it is a love story that simultaneously probes into the intricacies and follies of memory and identity, propped with the evocation of the joys of quotidian existence. The novel is also an exploration of what is real and what is not, and of the subconscious. On top of this, the novel explores time and pays homage to writing, books, and libraries. More importantly, it is a shout into the void, a reminder that we can always work on our passion projects despite the passage of time. Like his earlier works, deciphering the City and Its Uncertain Walls is not for the faint of heart. But maybe that is the entire point. Murakami strings us along for the ride, making us navigate labyrinths, and simply getting lost in a swirl of the real and the unreal.

You search for a reasonable, convincing explanation. You need that more than anything. But nobody has one. Nobody tells you where to go now. No one consoles you or encourages you. (It wouldn’t help even if they did.) You’re left utterly alone in a desolate land. Not a single tree or blade of grass to be seen. A strong wind is already blowing in one direction there—a wind that stings the skin like tiny needles. You’ve been mercilessly excluded from a world of warmth. Isolated. With thoughts that have no outlet, lying heavy, like a lump of lead, inside you.

Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Certain Walls
Book Specs

Author: Haruki Murakami
Translator (from Japanese): Philip Gabriel
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Publishing Date: November 2024 (April 2023)
No. of Pages: 445
Genre: Magical Realism, Literary, Romance

Synopsis

When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote village with mysteries of its own.

When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose.

A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times.

About the Author

To know more about Haruki Murakami, click here.