The City and Its Uncertain Walls was originally published as a novella in 1980, but Japanese writer Haruki Murakami wasn’t happy with how much (or little) he was able to explore in it. He went on to write many other books, using some of the ideas in the novella for them, but (as per his own afterword in his novel), never quite feeling as if he’d settled that story fully. In 2020 during the pandemic, Murakami decided to revisit the novella and write his latest book, an exploration of many of his favourite themes and ideas.
Like many of Murakami’s novels, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is also told from the perspective of an unnamed male protagonist. The narrator is referred to only as Boku (“I,” a first person indicator in Japanese), and is a 17 year old young man in love with a 16 year old girl. The two live in different towns but meet as soon as they can, exchanging letters in the time between. The girl (also nameless) confesses that she isn’t really there—her reality is actually a city somewhere else, where she works in a library. In order to find her in that world, the world that is her reality, the young man would have to give up his human eyes, become a “Dream Reader,” lose his shadow, and leave his home and his world behind. The two young people talk about this city a lot, creating more of it with their imaginations in each conversation. One day the girl vanishes forever, and we are left to wonder if she really did go back to her true home.
Many years later, we meet the narrator as a middle-aged man who has lived an uneventful, unremarkable life and is still pining for his lost teenage love. Looking for fulfillment, he decides to take on a job as a librarian in a nameless small town, where he takes over from the library’s mysterious benefactor and founder, meets a nice woman, and befriends a neurodivergent boy who wants to go to the same city that narrator’s teenage love interest claimed to live in.
Meanwhile, in a parallel timeline, the narrator is also living as an adult in the city his 17 year old self dreamed about. He is indeed the Dream Reader for the library where the 16 year old girl works. He recognises her, but she has no memory of him or of another, alternate reality. Of course, he is a gentleman and does not treat her with anything but the respect of a colleague and eventual friend, but a middle aged man befriending a 16 year old he was once in love with is still a rather unsavoury idea, though there is little to make us think this is anything negative. Still, with so much onus on the reader to make what we will of this story, it’s a little hard to remove the ick factor from middle aged narrator’s interactions with a 16 year old girl, be they all entirely above board.
If it sounds a little confusing, that’s because it is. Murakami is well known for blurring boundaries constantly and consistently. He isn’t interested in giving clear meaning to his stories, wrapping up narratives neatly (if at all!) or keeping anything other than the most amorphous of distinctions between reality and fantasy. The titular city of this novel is perhaps the physical manifestation of a fantasy, or perhaps it is an alternate world. Perhaps it is either, or neither. At some point a character offers his own theory about the city and it’s walls, suggesting that the “wall surrounding the town is the consciousness that creates you as a person. Which is why the wall can freely change shape apart from any personal intentions. A person’s consciousness is the same as a glacier, with only a fraction of it showing above water. Most of it is hidden, unseen, sunk in a dark place.” But then, what is it city itself? A person’s inner self? Their soul? What does any of it mean?! And does it even really matter?
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The City and Its Uncertain Walls
A great deal of the onus is put on the reader to decipher what they will from what they read; this novel, perhaps more than his previous work, has a very strong ‘you figure it out’ vibe. But does Murakami himself know what it all means? To a great extent, the novel feels like he is treading trodden ground, though, given Murakami’s massive oeuvre and decades of writing, perhaps this can be called self-referential and not repetitive?
To be perfectly honest, The City is basically Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The same Gatekeeper, Librarian, unicorns, bridges, the same clocks with no hands. It’s a familiar space to those who have read the earlier novel, and no attempts are made to make it much different. Murakami is harvesting the same field here, and it does raise the question of what in the original story remained to be harvested, given his earlier novels. There are a lot of similarities to Kafka on the Shore as well, beyond the standard Murakami motifs that many fans of the writer are fond of and look forward to spotting. Classic Murakami-isms abound here too: cats, a longing for lost love, towns that may or may not exist, characters with no names known only by what they do or how they dress, jazz, the Beatles, unicorns, stories, dreams, libraries, Shadow selves, Jungian philosophy, dual narratives, lonely middle aged man still dwelling on their teen years, lovely women with perfect ears and undeniably a lot of meanders, too. These are mostly quaint, filled with classic Murakami-isms, but to anyone not looking to score out their Murakami motif bingo card, these meanders may start to incite some tedium. For what its worth though, the translation by Philip Gabriel is (as one can only assume the original Japanese to be) elegant, simple and often quite lovely.
Murakami refers to the Latin magic realist writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez by name in The City and its Uncertain Walls. He writes that in Marquez’ work, “the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, are all mixed together in one… Like that’s an entire ordinary, everyday thing.” The same can be said of Murakami’s work, of course, especially in this novel, where everything is hazy and hallucinatory, shadow selves have a personality unique to the person they are attached to, and every experience is only as real as the feeling it evokes.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls is published by Knopf.
