Thành phố và những bức tường bất định

by Haruki Murakami, Uyên Thiểm (Translator)

Năm 1980, Haruki Murakami đã viết một câu chuyện về một thành phố có tường bao quanh khi ông mới ra mắt. Hơn bốn thập kỷ sau, với tư cách là một tiểu thuyết gia dày dạn kinh nghiệm và được hoan nghênh, ông đã mang đến cho nó một diện mạo mới thông qua tiểu thuyết “Thành Phố Và Những Bức Tường Bất Định”.

Cuốn tiểu thuyết được chia thành 3 phần. Phần đầu dựa trên truyện ngắn cùng tên được phát hành năm 1980 của nhà văn Haruki Murakami. Khi ấy, người đàn ông kể chuyện đang tìm kiếm người bạn gái từ thời niên thiếu khi di chuyển qua lại giữa thế giới thực và và một thành phố giả tưởng được bao quanh bởi một bức tường rất cao. Ở phần hai, nhân vật chính từ bỏ công việc để làm việc tại thư viện ở một thị trấn mới. Và trong phần ba, câu chuyện quay trở lại thành phố có bức tường bao quanh.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Japan, Japanese Literature, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

525 pages, Paperback

First published April 13, 2023

About the author

Haruki Murakami (村上春樹) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Tanizaki Prize, Yomiuri Prize for Literature, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Noma Literary Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction, the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Princess of Asturias Awards.
Growing up in Ashiya, near Kobe before moving to Tokyo to attend Waseda University, he published his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) after working as the owner of a small jazz bar for seven years. His notable works include the novels Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Kafka on the Shore (2002) and 1Q84 (2009–10); the last was ranked as the best work of Japan's Heisei era (1989–2019) by the national newspaper Asahi Shimbun's survey of literary experts. His work spans genres including science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction, and has become known for his use of magical realist elements. His official website cites Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan as key inspirations to his work, while Murakami himself has named Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy and Dag Solstad as his favourite currently active writers. Murakami has also published five short story collections, including First Person Singular (2020), and non-fiction works including Underground (1997), an oral history of the Tokyo subway sarin attack, and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007), a memoir about his experience as a long distance runner.
His fiction has polarized literary critics and the reading public. He has sometimes been criticised by Japan's literary establishment as un-Japanese, leading to Murakami's recalling that he was a "black sheep in the Japanese literary world". Meanwhile, Murakami has been described by Gary Fisketjon, the editor of Murakami's collection The Elephant Vanishes (1993), as a "truly extraordinary writer", while Steven Poole of The Guardian praised Murakami as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his oeuvre.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘In the world outside the wall, you loved my shadow.’

To enter the space of a Haruki Murakami novel is to pass into a realm adjacent to our own, one teeming with possibility as the familiar and unfamiliar commingle in an ephemeral elegance. ‘I no longer possessed a set standard with which to determine what was real,’ the nameless narrator of Murakami’s The City and It’s Uncertain Walls considers because, eventually, the distinctions between the familiar and unfamiliar, or between reality and unreality, aren’t just blurred together as much as such differentiation becomes beside the point. It is this vague realm full of wonderment and whimsicality that serves as a catalyst for introspective investigations, coupled with his soothing narrative voice and infectious imagination, that I find utterly irresistible and am frequently returning to his stories as a source of comfort and awe. I always find the world around me to feel slightly magical whenever I'm midway through his books. The City and It’s Uncertain Walls is a story about such realms separated by—you guessed it!—an uncertain wall of sorts, made up of many stories within and all housed together between the covers not unlike the way the two libraries central to the novel are home to a vast collection of stories themselves, one stocked with books, the other with dreams.

These stories continually inform each other from opposite sides of the veil where ‘everything is overwritten, renewed,’ not unlike the existence of this book itself. While it is his latest work, published in Japan in 2023 as 街とその不確かな壁 and released in an English translation by Philip Gabriel in 2024, The City and It’s Uncertain Walls originated as an early, novella length story printed in the literary magazine Bungakukai in 1980 but never published in book form. It formed the basis of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and was rewritten and significantly expanded during the social separations of the COVID-19 pandemic (which informs many thematic elements here) to create a novel contrasting the world inside and outside the walls and a present haunted by the past for both the narrator and the author. While the novel as a whole doesn’t quite hold up to its impressive first part and some of the fairly problematic aspects of Murakami’s works are still present, it is still a delight to pass through. A fantastical and fascinating page-turner of a quiet novel with a deep love for libraries at its heart, The City and It’s Uncertain Walls is a story of love and loss, a story of the self and our shadows, a ghost story, a story of our endless search for meaning amidst chaos and confusion and a story about the stories we tell to better understand our own story.

‘Is this world inside the high brick wall? Or outside it?’

Late in the novel, the proprietor of the coffee shop frequented by our narrator observes while reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez that his method of incorporating magical elements ‘might fit the critical criteria of magical realism, for García Márquez himself it’s just ordinary realism. In the world he inhabits the real and the unreal coexist.’ While the narrator processes this discussion in context of his own ineffable disorientation where ‘the real and the unreal coexist,’ it can also be interpreted as Murakami offering a comparative explanation to how ‘the real and the unreal are equivalent’ in his own work. ‘I was starting to have a hard time judging what was weird and what was not,’ the narrator tells us but once the boundaries between the two have dissolved, the opportunity for deeper insights on the self, the human condition or even reality itself arises ‘like the dawn arriving and sunshine streaming through the window.’ As Murakami writes in Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, ‘reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you’re no longer talking about reality’ and so we find in his works that life tends to reveal itself best through these abstract angles. Though confusion certainly abounds here as well with two frames of reality colliding amidst disappearing first loves, a library of dreams, a city population stripped of their shadows, and a host of ghosts that all send us spiraling through the narrative.

‘Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change and movement. Isn’t this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?’

There are a multitude of plot threads woven together here and while some are tightly knotted—such as the past and present in part one—others drift away into irresolution. I find the latter to be some of his most charming elements and little asides such as the story of the nightly visits from a ghost who only reveals one side of her face to a wounded soldier tend to be amongst his most memorable bits in his novels that still function as thematic texture despite the lack of conclusive story. In the book Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami, an early interview finds Murakami troubled by the hefty edits of his early works, sometimes a full hundred pages being cut as is the case in Hard-Boiled Wonderland (an unabridged retranslation from Jay Rubin will be published in a few weeks), expressing a sadness that he feels Western audiences tend to require resolution in order to value a plotline instead of seeing them as thematic notes in a larger orchestration. This is key as Murakami claims his writing style and structure was something he ‘learned from music.’ In his 2007 essay Jazz Messenger (translated by Jay Rubin) he says that his writing tends to be based in the ideas of the ‘free improvisation’ he finds in jazz music:

‘I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be. Many people don't believe me. But that's the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don't know what's going to happen next. I'm searching for melody after melody.’

Some readers may find this cumbersome or aimless but, as the mysterious stranger in the story Cream from First Person Singular explains while detailing an impossible object, ‘there’s no need to know what it’s all about’ and Murakami’s work is about abstraction and emotion, not one-to-one metaphors and tidy explanations. But despite the abstract nature and his storytelling tending towards the surreal, his prose is often rather succinct, simple and direct in a way that makes it effortlessly engaging. Midway through The City and its Uncertain Walls, the narrator describes his spring coat in a way that reminds me of his prose: ‘a worn-out coat someone had probably worn for years but, oddly enough, fit like a bespoke jacket.’ Its basic and well trodden, especially at this point in his career, but bears an ineffable magic that might not seem like much to an outsider but for those who love to be engulfed in his works it is incredibly comfortable and cozy. It is also a warm familiarity and I find that Murakami’s works are like jazz in the sense that they function as different variations on the same set of signature themes. In the novel’s afterword he writes:

‘As Jorge Luis Borges put it, there are basically a limited number of stories one writer can seriously relate in his lifetime. All we do—I think it’s fair to say—is take that limited palette of motifs, change the approach and methods as we go, and rewrite them in all sorts of ways.’

This seems pertinent for this novel especially since it is framed around a rewrite where Hard-Boiled ‘was one response to the original story,’ and this version was set about with the intent of ‘creating a story that coexisted with [the original], so that the two complemented each other.’ While admittedly part one (which seems to be the rewrite of the original story) is by far the strongest section of the novel—had he merely published part one as a stand-alone novella I’d be giving this 5 stars and proclaiming it as easily one of his best works—with the rest being engaging but as adrift on the whims of a narrative breeze as leaves swirling in autumnal gusts (not unlike the narrator, to be fair), I did find the juxtaposition of the recent bulk of the work with the tighter early section to be rather thematically successful in the sense that it contrasts the authorial Murakami of memory with the Murakami of the present.

‘There isn’t just one reality. Reality is something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives.’

I think The City and its Uncertain Walls is a novel that is best read allowing it to flow over and through you instead of trying to grasp a hold of it in order to shake out objective truths and concrete ideas from its pockets. It contains multitudes and those playing Murakami Bingo better get their chips ready because the representation is real with this one.

And speaking of representation, I absolutely adored the focus on libraries in this book. While I didn’t love the idea of a privately owned library, I do understand why this was necessary for the plot to work and the tenderness for which Murakami addresses the function of libraries as necessary for a community was lovely.

‘To create a special, comfortable spot to gather lots of books, and to have many people freely read them—for Mr. Koyasu, that was the ideal world.’

The dualities of the rural library and the dream library within the walls, tethered into memory by the dual wood stoves in his offices, is the hinge holding the novel together and all the people in their orbits. We have Yellow Submarine Boy becoming the ‘ultimate personal library,’ through his endless reading of the narrator for whom the library gives a purpose after having been aloof and adrift since the disappearance of the girl he loves during his teenage years. His loneliness in her absence reminds me of part from the poem Ours To Hold And Caress And Cherish by Hanif Abdurraquib about a ghost haunting his house that reads:

‘To believe in the reality of a single soulmate is to believe that every lonely life exists because someone didn’t travel towards someone else. A child dies somewhere and then, decades later, someone lives a series of unsatisfied days. Watches the game shows alone & goes to bed early, each day its own small apocalyptic orchestra of near-silence…it is like being held, in this way, by a lover from a world that has already ended. A different lover for every reflection in the room. And yet, when I wake, someone I loved once is still alive, somewhere else.’

The ghosts of the past propel the narrative here, as well as people who, like the girl, feel they are not truly living but the shadow of their real self who resides in the mysterious city behind the walls. ‘My real self — the real me — is in a town far away, living a completely different life,’ she tells him not long before she ‘disappears. Literally, like smoke vanishing.’ And so to this town he must finally go.

‘I was so taken by you, I thought of nothing else when awake. You haunted my dreams, as well.’

Much of the book concerns the aspect that unreality is just as real as reality—the pain from a dream might not be real but it hurts all the same—and gives us an understanding that emotions are the core of life. Even if not grounded in reality, they still inform upon our thoughts and actions. The titular city is a place where ‘feelings are not just useless but harmful. Like seeds of an epidemic’ as the narrator’s shadow (who must be removed in order for him to enter) theorizes. I really enjoyed how this place was a ‘world of made-up stories and contradictions,’ that was created by the stories of a 16 year old girl. It reminds me of the bonkers inner logic of the Ghibli film The Cat Returns, also a world that exists in the imagination of a teenage author.

But is it real? Does that even matter here? ‘Consciousness is the brain’s self-awareness of its own physical state,’ a character states and if you're aware of yourself in the context of this world, who is to say it isn’t real for you. Such realms can be a comfort for those who don’t fit in with the “real” world. Like in 1Q84 when Aomame expresses ‘Either I’m funny or the world’s funny. I don’t know which. The bottle and lid don’t fit,’ sometimes you have to create a world in which you fit. Similarly, concrete explanations of the girl disappearing or possible health conditions are beside the point as it is the emotional resonance that tells the story (which, okay, not exactly great her life is relegated to being the emotional texture for the male narrator’s story). Either way, reality is secondary to the ennui driving the narrative.

‘The you who lives here doesn’t dream, and doesn’t love anyone.’

One can read a lot of dynamic metaphors in the city and its walls, such as the pandemic isolation conditions that led to the creation of the novel. Murakami confirms this in a recent interview with The Guardian:

’The situation of the town surrounded by walls was also a metaphor of the worldwide lockdown. How is it possible for both extreme isolation and warm feelings of empathy to coexist?’

His works often probe the human consciousness in the wake of disaster (think After the Quake or Underground) and so, too, we find many references to national tragedies. The library found in the Fukushima prefecture, the snow falling like ash, or the shadows left behind after death that recall the shadows after the atomic bomb. There is a lot of rather haunting, poignant imagery like the clock with no hands in the city without time. Mechanical clocks arrived in Japan during the Edo Period, marking a change from the previous temporal system of time and were often used symbolically in the arts during this period as a metaphor for the hidden intricacy of the human heart. This is certainly keeping with the novel’s themes. In her book Clock Without Hands, Carson McCullers describes a terminally ill character as ‘a man watching a clock without hands,’ symbolizing his lack of control but also, in the larger context of the story, a sense of uncertainty, change and the ‘mysterious drama’ of the human condition, not unlike here as well. ‘How can the dead be truly dead when they are still walking in my heart?’ a character asks, and here too we find that the memory of a person often makes them just as alive as their flesh and blood self. Or more alive, as is the case of the eternally 16 year old girl inside the walls.

‘Something kept us apart—something impenetrable, something like, for instance, a high brick wall.’

There are some less than flattering depictions in this novel—while it isn’t intended as trans representation, the discussions on a character wearing a skirt might raise some eyebrows even though its clear Murakami isn’t intending it as negative—and some of the late metaphors for the impenetrable wall are a bit odd. Murakami detractors will not be won over by this novel, but all in all it is still a fun and thought provoking ride.

'A person’s consciousness is the same as a glacier…most of it is hidden, unseen, sunk in a dark place.’

‘Books and doors are the same thing,’ wrote Jeanette Winterson, ‘you open them, and you go through into another world,’ and to open a Murakami book is to open a unique door into a realm of thoughtful whimsicality. I had a blast with The City and Its Uncertain Walls and found it to read like the classic Murakami works that made me fall in love with his novels to begin with. An interesting look at how reality and unreality can coexist amidst a yearning tale of love and self-discovery, this was a wild ride from start to finish. Imperfect, yet perfectly lovable all the same.

3.5/5

‘Like the crew of a sinking sailboat clinging to the mast, maybe we are only capable of clinging, desperately, to one reality. Whether we like it or not.
But how much do we know about the secret, dark labyrinth of a river that flows underneath us, below the solid ground we stand on? How many have actually seen it and, having seen it, could make it back to the other side?’

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

i haven't read the synopsis of this but i'm going to guess a bumbling man descends into a fantasy version of our own world in which a scary sexy woman becomes obsessed with him

i want to note two things before i fully review this: that synopsis is actually not that far off, and yet i still liked it.

this book is simultaneously two things: 
- a book about a teenager whose brief high school love story ruins his life to the point that he, in middle age, gives up his existence and shadow to move to a made-up town and analyze dreams in the company of a still-16-year-old version of his girlfriend from a million years ago, and
- a slow, withholding, uneventful, challenging read about childhood and memory, dreaming and nostalgia, introversion and success, love and humanity. 

it was the best of times and the worst of times, uneven in its moments of brilliance and of typical murakami cringe. this is an adaptation of a novella that he had already previously adapted into a different book, and i think that shows in good ways and in bad.

murakami has one of our generation's most magical and inventive minds when it comes to creating new forms of strangeness towards women and creating whole mythical narratives to excuse them.
but you can't deny he really is magical and inventive.

bottom line: as always, pros and cons. but slightly more pros.

(3.5 / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)

[Taufiq Yves · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a huge fan of Haruki Murakami I was super excited when I heard about his new novel and dove right into it.

The story is set in a small town where everyone lives a peaceful but kind of dull life, like they’re all trapped by an invisible wall. This wall is both a physical and mental barrier, keeping everyone’s lives pretty much the same, with similar ups and downs. But underneath this calm surface, there’s a lot of uncertainty.

The main character, an ordinary young guy, lives a pretty bland life until he accidentally discovers the mysterious wall. This wall has some kind of magic that lets people see their deepest fears and desires. He starts exploring, trying to understand his own inner world.

As he goes on, he realizes that the wall isn’t just a wall; it’s a symbol of people’s fear and avoidance of the unknown. In this town, people are scared of change and uncertainty, so they choose to escape and confine themselves. But this escape doesn’t really solve anything; it just makes people lose themselves even more.

So, he decides to break down this wall. He faces his fears and anxieties head-on, trying to find his true self. He goes through a lot of challenges, but he never gives up.

Through this small town and the wall, Murakami shows the complexity of human nature and the real meaning of life. He tells us that facing uncertainty isn’t what’s scary; choosing to escape is. Only by bravely facing our inner selves can we find our true selves.

Murakami’s signature style is all over this book. You can see elements of his previous works everywhere: the town and the dream interpreter remind you of Norwegian Wood, the library and its stories remind me of Kafka on the Shore, and the first love of a 16 17-year-old remind you of South of the Border, West of the Sun. But this time, instead of focusing on external conflicts, he dives into the depths of his own psyche. Beyond the content, his writing style is as captivating as ever, and I’m still totally hooked.

Compared to his earlier works, this 1 feels gentler. It seems like there’s a sense of reconciliation between him and his older self.

I especially love the ending. I want to interpret it in a way that goes beyond fiction itself. From 1 angle, it can be seen as Murakami’s farewell, both as a writer and as a person, to his writing career and to life itself (even though he’s not at the end of his life yet).

When he takes that deep breath, the images that flood his mind might be a reenactment of his decades-long writing career or maybe a reflection of his 70 or 80 years of life. Among them are things he cherishes and protects.

”Believe that your alter ego exists. He will catch you.”

The ‘alter ego’ mentioned could refer to his successors, new writers, maybe newcomers to literary creation, or even new generations of humanity. In his last possible decade or two of life, Murakami expresses hope for the future. He believes that after he’s gone, his literature and other legacies won’t disappear. Instead, they’ll inspire others to create their own works, and his passion, willpower, idealism, imagination, and emotions will be passed on.

”Darkness fell. It was an extremely deep and incredibly soft darkness.”

The final darkness can be seen as his idea of death. Here, death loses its terrifying connotations. In a way, death also represents rebirth.

The boy with extraordinary intelligence but no emotions, and the narrator, who is ordinary but has emotions, together form a kind of perfection, an ideal, just like the airtight walls of the town.

The airtight town is our inner town; the ever-changing walls are also our inner walls. In fact, the walls are just our inner fears. How do we overcome fear? Murakami provides an answer in this book - belief. The power of belief.

Inside the walls and outside the walls, which is real and which is illusory? It’s hard to tell. Which is the true ‘I’ and which is the shadow? I don’t know. But what is certain is that the true ‘I’ and the shadow must become one. That is the complete ‘I,’ despite its imperfections. The shadow of the first love separated from the real person and disappeared without a trace, but the narrator can choose to find the other half that makes up his true self - either his physical form or shadow. And how does he find the other half of himself and become complete? Through belief.

In this novel, I felt a strong sense of farewell. Murakami will definitely keep writing until he’s too old, but given his age, how many more new books can we expect from him? But like him, I’m not a pessimist. I believe in things, I believe in the warm sunshine of tomorrow, and I believe that what he’s left to the world will become a seed, that it will survive the bitter cold of winter, and that in spring it will sprout and grow endlessly...

While I’m sad to see this era of his writing come to a close, I’m grateful for the countless hours of joy and contemplation his works have given me.

Thank you so much, my friend.

5 / 5 stars

My other reviews of Murakami's Work:
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Norwegian Wood
1Q84
Hear the Wind Sing
Kafka on the Shore
Sputnik Sweetheart
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
South of the Border, West of the Sun
After Dark

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

English (currently being translated): "The City and Its Uncertain Walls"
Murakami just turned 75, and his new novel is a full-on firework of references to his literary legacy as well as to monoliths of international fiction by other authors. Based on a short story of the same title he wrote 40 years ago and that was published in a literary magazine, "The City..." is a counterpart to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the latter also already being inspired by aforementioned story. Murakami explains that he has always been bothered by the fact that he felt that the original 100-page-version didn't achieve the narrative's full potential, so his new work is his attempt to doing the source material justice. And oh boy, this is certainly the murakami-est Murakami book to ever grace the canon of Murakami (and if you enjoy playing the infamous Murakami motif bingo, you'll be delighted).

Our unnamed protagonist is a 45-year-old, unmarried man who is still grieving his first love who, when they were 16 and 17 respectively, suddenly disappeared. Together, they had been imagining their own city behind a wall, and the girl had proclaimed that this is where her true self resides. Through magical circumstances, the now older protagonist actually makes it into this counter-world, where the (still 16-year-old) girl works in a library that archives dreams and cannot recognize him. He becomes a professional dream-reader, but then decides to help his shadow leave the counter-world: To overcome the wall, a person has to separate from their shadow and let it die behind the walls, which the protagonist cannot bring himself to do. Back in the other, real (?) world, lonely and sad, the protagonist takes a job in a remote village in Fukushima as a librarian, where a mysterious young savant and a ghostly old bookworm might help him cross the wall again...

What the wall, the city, and the shadow stand for is the main concern of the text itself: Physical being and shadow as the separation of body and consciousness, but they might turn out to be inseparable and thus interchangeable (or alter ego variations of the self), the city as a manifestation of the subconscious, of wishes, of stories or even (hey, it's also a künstlerroman) literature becoming reality. And then the wall: It moves on its own accord, thus exercising the power to decide where one world starts or the other ends - or even proclaiming that it can't really be overcome, that there is no separation where we expect it to be.

The core reference here is Gabriel García Márquez: Murakami, the guy who is seen as the master of Japanese magical realism, ponders the power of this literary technique, and thus is own literary convictions, by declaring - and this is fascinating - that for Marquez, there is no separation between reality and the fantastical in his own surroundings, thus that he is more of a chronicler than a fiction writer. Much like McCarthy in his latest double feature The Passenger / Stella Maris, Murakami investigates whether our imagination, conscious and subconscious, isn't just as powerful and real as the world around us. The largest parts of the book hence take place in libraries recording human consciousness and subconsciousness, and the condition of the savant points to Jorge Luis Borges' Funes, the Memorious.

You can also go ahead and find all kinds of other novels by Murakami in this tome, from Norwegian Wood over Kafka on the Shore to Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, you can reference Adelbert von Chamisso and all kinds of fairy tales. But the fun of this of course way too long, but wonderfully flowing, entertaining and mesmerizing novel is to track everything to the philosophical context that reflects questions of consciousness and imagination. Why is the counter-world more bleak than the real world? Why is the remote village in Fukushima? Why do unicorns die so humans don't have to? Does the writer Murakami actually live in a subconscious city behind a wall, and the guy we see is just his ghost? This book offers a story and ideas to discuss with other book enthusiasts.

Ursula Gräfe's translation into German is as flawless as usual, and have linked our (much deeper) discussion on the podcast (feat. Ursula) here: https://papierstaupodcast.de/allgemei...

[Liong · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had been waiting for this book to be translated into English or Chinese for a year.

For about ten days, I was completely immersed and enveloped in its world.

I truly enjoyed the time I spent in both this fictional city and the real world around me. Yet, I found myself questioning: Is this city real, or does it not exist at all? 🤔

Now, it’s time to revisit the Murakami Bingo. 😍

Courtesy to New York Times.

Murakami writes in this book, "No matter how many pages you turned without page numbers changing."

“Like I can't draw a line between dream and reality.” This sentiment resonates deeply throughout the novel.

I felt sad and forlorn when the protagonist used "Farewell" instead of "See you tomorrow" during the final trip to take the girl home. Could this be a hint that this might be Murakami’s last novel?

This novel is not easy to read; its impact varies depending on the reader’s age and life experiences.

If I were to sum up the book, it would be this: Nothing is permanent, and yet, nothing is truly impermanent—in this world or the one beyond.

Finally, I returned to this world and realized my watch hands were showing it was time to sleep. ⌚

Am I still dreaming, or am I writing this review on Goodreads? Is it my shadow or my true self doing this? 🤔

This book challenges us to think deeply about memory, identity, love, connection, our inner and outer worlds, the certainty of reality, and the power of visualization.

[John Mauro · Rating 5 out of 5]

My complete review is published at Before We Go Blog.

Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, The City and its Uncertain Walls, serves as his love letter to magical realism and the transcendent power of the written word. The novel traces its origin to a short story of the same name, published in a Japanese literary magazine in 1980. Murakami was unsatisfied with the story and never included it in his anthologies. Nevertheless, its main premise of a time-bending alternate reality served as the starting point for one of the two storylines in his 1985 novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. However, the original short story still nagged at Murakami, and he decided to return to it decades later as a more mature, experienced writer. Murakami began work on the novelized version of The City and its Uncertain Walls in 2020, forty years after publishing his original short story. The novel became a pandemic project for Murakami, which feels apropos for a story steeped in isolation.

Like many of Murakami’s tales, The City and its Uncertain Walls is told from the first-person perspective of an unnamed male protagonist, conventionally known as “Boku,” one of the Japanese words for “I.” The novel begins as a love story between the seventeen-year-old Boku and his schoolmate, a sixteen-year-old girl who seems detached from reality. She tells Boku that her true self is not in this world, but in an alternate plane of existence, working at a library of dreams in a town surrounded by an immensely tall wall. She tells Boku that he can meet her in that world, becoming the Dream Reader at the library, but when they meet she will have no memory of having known him from outside the walls of that world. One day the girl disappears without warning, and Boku can only assume that she has gone to the fantastical library of her dreams.

In the second part of The City and its Uncertain Walls, we follow Boku into his isolated middle-aged existence. Unsatisfied with his career, he quits his job to become the head librarian at a privately endowed library in a rural community, where he starts to form meaningful attachments to other people. Of particular note is an autistic boy who devours books at the library and seems to retain all the information he reads, essentially becoming a library himself. The relationships that Boku forms at the library may also be key for him to understand what happened to the girl who captured his heart as a boy.

The fantasy world in The City and its Uncertain Walls will already be familiar to anyone who has read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It’s a land where unicorns roam the streets and an imposing Gatekeeper forces people to separate from their shadows. While Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World paid much more attention to the shadows and unicorns, The City and its Uncertain Walls is more concerned with the nature of time, which ceases to have any meaning in this parallel world.

Although the back-of-the-book blurb describes The City and its Uncertain Walls as “an ode to books and to the libraries that house them,” I believe a more accurate description is that it’s Murakami’s ode to magical realism itself: the coexistence of the real and unreal, the living and the dead, the physical and the metaphysical. As in many of his other novels, Murakami uses magical realism to address the universal human desire for finding deeper meaning in a shallow and uncaring world. Murakami even includes a fitting tip of the hat to Gabriel García Márquez, the late Colombian author who was a pioneer in the magical realism genre.

Reading The City and its Uncertain Walls evokes similar feelings as watching a Hayao Miyazaki movie. Murakami includes several direct references to Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. But I think the more fitting comparison is with Miyazaki’s last film, The Boy and the Heron. As in this final opus from Miyazaki, Murakami is not treading any new ground in The City and its Uncertain Walls. Rather, he distills many of his favorite themes, including loneliness, aging, and the quest for spiritual transcendence, into one career-encompassing story.

The connections to Murakami’s other works are numerous. Given its shared world, Murakami’s latest novel links most closely with Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Both novels start with the same basic idea, but Murakami takes them in two very different directions. The City and its Uncertain Walls lacks the “hard-boiled wonderland” part of his previous work, giving it a more authentic, sentimental feel. As in Murakami’s most popular novel, Norwegian Wood, The City and its Uncertain Walls features young love doomed by sudden disappearance. The new novel also includes Murakami’s requisite Beatles reference, this time to “Yellow Submarine.” But the deeply introspective nature of the novel most closely recalls that of his greatest masterpiece, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Murakami’s writing has aged like a fine wine, with eloquent ruminations on the nature of time and memory that recall one of his own literary heroes, the incomparable Marcel Proust. In terms of more recent literature, The City and its Uncertain Walls is recommended for fans of The Book that Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence. Both of these beautifully written novels pay homage to books and libraries, delivering insights on the nature of time and aging within a love story set across parallel worlds. However, while Lawrence delivers plenty of fantasy action, Murakami slows the pace down dramatically with meditations on isolation and social interaction. Although this is probably Murakami’s slowest-paced book to date, I savored every moment.

Altogether, The City and its Uncertain Walls is a well-earned victory lap for the marathon-running Haruki Murakami, forty-five years into his distinguished literary career. This is Murakami’s most refined and eloquent work to date, a Proustian novel full of nuance and emotion that leverages magical realism to take on the tyranny of time itself.

[Henk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well this was a deception, classic case of Murakami teasing a lot but not fully delivering on the interesting concepts in the end. A metaphorical city tied to childhood losses controls a whole life and book without satisfying catharsis

A city where people don’t have shadows, where unicorns roam and where the walls move to contain the populace. The setting of the new Haruki Murakami is interesting but never crystallizes further into a coherent narrative leading to a plot. Maybe a metaphor for the things one loses as a child and which can never be revisited or changed, but way too long to be fully engrossing and interesting. Also everyone has hunches, intuitions, convictions, or infodumps delivered to them by ghosts, just to keep things moving on in the most inelegant manner possible.

People in general in the The City and Its Uncertain Walls feel numb, reeling from childhood/high-school romances they never seem to be able to surmount in later life, being unmoored and adrift as outsiders in the wider world when growing up. Being a dream reader of eggs in a mysterious cold city, even if taken into account some damage to the eyes, hence becomes an obsession to the main character.

The initial love history to be fair is touching, if borderline saccharine, but the long, long, long rural library scenes that didn't go anywhere accept for drinking coffee, eating pastries and sort of abducting a trouble teenager, never satisfied anything I actually wanted in the second half of the novel.

Again, maybe the city is a metaphor for mental health and the alienation modern day life brings upon people growing up, but even if it is, the execution is just too boring and longwinding to make this an overall worthwhile read for me.

Dutch Quotes:
Mensen die bang zijn om naar binnen te kijken om daar iets verschrikkelijks en onvermijdelijks te vinden

Mijn werkelijke lichaam is ergens anders

Nog even volhouden, naarmate je meer went aan het leven trekt de pijn zich terug.

Soms lijkt het doden van je bewustzijn het makkelijkste

Stilte en leegte, afgezien hiervan valt over de mens die ik ben niets meer te zeggen

De werkelijkheid en de onwerkelijkheid waren in mijn hoofd in een hevige strijd verwikkeld

Zoals de schaduw zei, het werd steeds moeilijker onderscheid te maken tussen wat hypothese was en wat werkelijkheid

Het diepe gevoel misplaatst te zijn

Het is gevaarlijk daaraan te denken

Wanneer een overledene verschijnt en zegt dat hij niet weet of er zoiets als een ziel is, hoe moet je daar dan tegen in brengen?

[Flo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Better to reread a favorite by Murakami than to read a new one that feels like it was written by an imitator copying his past works.

[Katharina Hartwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I understand people‘s grievances. But no other writer makes me feel like they were gently tidying my brain.

[Amina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Where do I begin? I have to credit myself for finishing this book—it was long and repetitive. I was chasing the plot, only to reach a point where the main character was chasing his shadow and existence, and I got lost in the translation,

The first half focuses on two nameless teenage lovers bound in an obsessive infatuation with one another. He thinks, dreams, and lives for the girl referred to as "you."

As I sat down beside you, I had an odd feeling, as if thousands of invisible threads were finely tying your body to my heart. The minute movement of your eyelids and the slight flutter of your lips were enough to stir my heart

Until she makes a shocking revelation and disappears:

The real me lives there, in that town, surrounded by a wall

The protagonist falls into the world behind the walls, becoming a dream reader with the help of a librarian (the girl) who is also a shadow.

Dreams were like a crucial water source nurturing your heart, conveying something vital

As time elapses, he returns to the real world and works as a librarian, learning about the mysterious life of the librarian before him. Magic realism takes effect. The lines blur between the real world and that behind the 'Uncertain City.' He goes into an existential discovery of who he is, meeting a young boy who helps him discover what has been missing in him all along.

My genuine opinion of this book is that the writing is beautiful and often thought-provoking. However, the beginning felt insanely repetitive. How many ways could Murakami describe the boy's infatuation with the girl? It lingers to the point of exhaustion. Also, the second present tense took me out of the story when describing or talking to the nameless girl. It didn't resonate with me because she felt like "other."

We sit with the protagonist as he talks about mundane tasks, to the point of being, dare I say, boring. I thought about DNF-ing the story, but one of my Goodreads buddies pushed me to continue—I'm glad I did.

The second half makes up for the first, kind of. It's a better story, even though it's sometimes confusing. I did reread several parts. I wanted to be satisfied by revelations but left wanting, unsure if things were going in circles. As a whole, I struggled to make the story one cohesive novel. It may be me, but I was frustrated.

I'm not a fan of perfectly linear stories, but I think this one expected the reader to dig deeper, maybe into their experiential existence--

We are told to,

Believe in the existence of your other self

I felt that line deeply. Maybe his book could have been a series of motivating quotes, which I took from it.

I'm on the fence about the rating. The prose is beautiful.

2.5/5 is where I'm sitting right now...

[Marc Martínez-Campayo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hacía años que no me enfadaba tanto con un libro. Esto es simplemente un despropósito y el peor Murakami hasta la fecha. La premisa inicial es interesante y, aunque le cuesta, parece que finalmente arranca. Pero, de repente, cuando no has leído ni 200 páginas, corta de raíz con lo que estaba planteando y salta a contarte el mayor tostonazo que has leído en toda tu vida. 300 páginas extra para describir detalles absurdos e inútiles y repetir las mismas estructuras y escenas (que no aportan nada y son densísimas) una y otra vez. Un libro pesadísimo cual chaval de discoteca, te da la misma chapa y te obliga también a poner los ojos en blanco cada quince segundos. El cierre es el mismo despropósito, aunque admito que las últimas 100 páginas las he leído en diagonal porque no podía más. No responde a las preguntas planteadas en la primera parte y que son lo único interesante del libro (no resuelve nada y lo peor es que te acaba dando igual). A la chica (que ocupa la cubierta y toda la contracubierta) no la busquéis, porque no se vuelve a saber nada de ella y lo que se sabe es entre poco y nada.

Lo que más me enfada es la aparente timidez de Murakami aquí para explicar ciertas cosas, como si quisiera decir mucho pero le diese demasiada pereza desarrollarlo. La trampa de que el narrador "no sepa explicar algo" y, por tanto, tengas una justificación para no explicar ese algo te puede funcionar una vez, pero cuando te acoges a ese comodín cada vez que pasa algo que podría ser interesante y que necesita de un desarrollo, acaba siendo directamente aburrido. Una y otra vez el protagonista repitiendo "no sabría definir lo que estaba pasando", "no podría explicar lo que sucedía", "era una sensación imposible de describir". El mundo mágico de las novelas de Murakami está pero sin estar, porque es Murakami escrito de memoria, perfectamente una autoparodia de sí mismo. Hay metáforas y comparaciones (o más bien imágenes innecesarias y metidas con calzador) que dan risa –cito textualmente: «Continuó mirándolos sin pestañear, con una agudeza crítica en la mirada que se diría propia de Paul Cézanne al abordar el estudio de las formas en su bodegón Cesto de manzanas»– y de la grima que da su utilización del sexo no hace falta ni hablar; es realmente apasionante leer durante 500 páginas a un hombre de más de 40 años que sigue obsesionado con una niña de 16 y sus "turgentes pechos" (lo de "turgentes pechos" aparece como cuatro veces). Es que ni siquiera es bonito de leer.

Una experiencia horrible, no lo leáis o hacedlo si vuestro objetivo es enfadaros muchísimo. Yo ya soy libre.

[Yuko Shimizu · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is late 2023, and this new novel has only been out in Japanese. So, this is not really a review. I am writing this to give fellow Murakami fans a small preview of what to expect.

If you have not read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World yet or have been a while since you did, you may want to revisit while you await the translation. (in fact, I should read it again too). These are not directly related, but they take place (partially) in the same world. The format is similar too, two worlds switch around in different chapters.

The original form of this story was published in a magazine as a novella back around 1980. The author expanded the story into this novel, after 40 years, during the pandemic. The characters, in the real world or in the walled city, seem so isolated and alone. Which may be explained by the circumstances in which this book was written.

This is a very quiet book. Nothing much happens, and yet, a lot of things happen. All very quietly.
Scenes are extremely vivid and visual, filled with symbols. As an illustrator, I have a strange and strong urge to draw these into sketches. (haven't had a chance yet!) Ghost of old male librarian in skirt, walled city without maps, unicorns, dreams in the library, old beret hat, stoves that burns apple tree rogs, shadows separeted from the owners, a boy in Yellow Submarine hoodie...

(I have no idea if Murakami knows or has read an Albanian novel The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare, which is also about isolation and reading dreams as an occupation, which I kept thinking about while I was reading this. )

It is a very long (as usual, all Murakami novels are!) quiet novel, but I never got bored.
I felt that it is a book only a writer who has lived long enough he is in a life stage where he has a lot of thoughts looking back at his life more so than looking at the future.

Five stars.
I am definitely going to be rereading this again soon. So much feelings. Hope you will enjoy it when it comes out in your language.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked all the characters, which is unusual for me. There's no real villain in the story. Closest thing that comes to it might be the gatekeeper, but the then again, is it really? Gatekeeper has a job to do, and it's for the protection of the city. Maybe it's the boy's parents for not loving him enough, but it sounds like they do care about him as they start wondering where he is. Maybe it's the coffee shop keeper's ex for his behavior that caused him to be an ex, but he's not even an active character - just a mention in her story.

I found it interesting that none of the characters have names except for the librarians that the protagonist works with. I'm sure that's an intentional choice, as if to reflect some of the themes of the book in exploring what is real, what is it we protect, and how much of our shared dreams and memories are ours uniquely.

Also, I really appreciated that Murakami talks about the coffee shop owner as asexual and the boy as neurodiverse without labeling them (which I realize I've just done, but forgive me please - this is only for me to make a point). People are labeled so easily, and as soon as they are, they are assigned a whole bunch of our projected biases. I much prefer for people/characters to state who they are and how they want to be seen and addressed. I also think that by avoiding labels, Murakami makes them a more integrated part of the social fabric - at least in the protagonist's social circle, but it sounds like Mr. Koyasu and Mrs. Soeda also accepted them as they are. I would like to see more of this in our books and in real life.

Speaking of the boy, he was such a great character. I love neurodivergent characters and people. I find their views on life and their interpretations of life to be so valuable. Their abilities are admirable too, and I think that's really well demonstrated with this boy's absolute focus on the map, on his journey, on his partnership proposal (seems like something none of the other city inhabitants thought of?). He's brilliant.

Mr. Koyasu, Mrs. Soeda, and the coffee shop owner are also wonderful tertiary characters. They have all followed their own life dreams by walking away from the conventional lives expected of them or started by them. This isn't something Japanese culture generally promotes. There is safety and acceptance in conformity, and being different is seen as both courageous and reckless, as something to root for while also being scandalized. The duality is really fascinating, but when people do stand out, you get amazing gifts to the world, like Masaaki Imai's Kaizen method of continuous improvement which put Toyota on the world map as having the highest quality cars. Through these characters, perhaps Murakami is encouraging his fellow Japanese to consider pursuing what's in their hearts. At the very least, I believe their presence in the book is to contrast with the protagonist's continuous introspection about what it is he wants, especially in comparison to the boy's actual pursuit of his dreams.

I thought the most interesting part of the book was the protagonist's shadow. I can't say more than that without giving away a major spoiler. But for those who've read the book, are you with me on that? At one point, I had to wonder if the boy was the shadow, but I'll leave it here to avoid that major spoiler. Suffice it to say that I thought manipulation of the shadow was a superb Murakami achievement.

Admittedly, I was worried early on when the protagonist finds his way to the city and finds his high school sweetheart. I was momentarily scared that this was going to go into some weird adult/minor romance. Phew! REALLY didn't need to know how that panned out. (Sorry folks - I don't consider the negative or absence of action to be a spoiler, so don't hate me for that one please.) However, I am nonetheless curious about what happens in the city wall after the protagonist decides not to jump in the pool.

Another thing I liked about this book - no big triggers. I feel like so many writers include terrible triggers in order to create the setting or the backstory or the conflict, etc. The only hurdles our protagonist needs to clear are his own desires and personal curiosities. I much prefer this. I think it shows Murakami as a much more mature and a much more skilled writer than all those others that have to include a rape or a suicide or child abuse, etc.

Beautifully written. Wish I could read the original in Japanese but grateful it's been translated into English. This is my second book by this author. For sure I'll be looking for another read soon.

[Jonas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant. I shall miss this dream world. There is so much I love about this novel. Of course it has all the classic Murakami, but it has so much more. Part 1 sets the scene of two souls who fall in love and create an imaginary city with uncertain walls. It solidly sets the scene and I would give that section 4 stars. From then on, straight away 5 stars. There is a shift in the story, a shift in setting, and in outlook. What I didn't realize was how much was happening/shifting without being aware while reading. I have reread/re-listened to Murakami's last three novels, and I already plan to re-listen/read this one.

I love the setting of a remote town, the simplicity of living there, the minimalistic mindset in regards to possessions, and most of all, the small local library. Reading The City and Its Uncertain Walls was like a Zen experience. It explored the concepts of death, reality, love, existence, and finding our place in the/our world. The characters were so unique and memorable: the head librarian, the Boy in the Yellow Submarine Jacket, and the woman who owns the coffee shop.

There is so much to contemplate. I underlined so many things. I loved his choice of words and the word play. There is SO much to think and talk about in regards to "shadows". I loved Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but loved The City and Its Uncertain Walls even more.

My review does not do The City and Its Uncertain Walls justice. My Goodreads friend, Taufiq, has written a beautiful review that I strongly recommend reading. It is an ode to Murakami and this incredible novel. The highest praise I can give is that I immediately wanted to reread and reexperience The City and Its Uncertain Walls.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Waarom lees ik Murakami? En waarom voelt dat intussen aan als een vorm van 'guilty pleasure'? Die vragen was ik me al tijdens het lezen van zijn nieuwste worp gaan stellen. Als lezer met altijd wel een wachtend stapeltje boeken op mijn leestafel hoef ik me intussen niet per se over te geven aan de literaire waan van de dag, maar een handvol auteurs doet mij toch altijd meteen naar de boekhandel rennen als ze een nieuwe roman uitbrengen (o.a. Knausgård, Pfeijffer en dus ook Murakami). Soms is het blijkbaar gewoon fijn om mee te gaan in een hype.

Murakami is in tegenstelling tot die twee andere auteurs nooit echt verrassend. Zijn oeuvre vormt een wereld op zich; een universum met magisch-realistische variaties waarin muziek, metafysica en een kafkaiaanse vervreemding terugkerende elementen zijn. Als je hem leest, stap je dat universum binnen en geef je jezelf over aan de verwondering en aan zijn bezwerende stijl.

Over die bezwerende stijl begon ik tijdens het lezen van deze roman na te denken, zeker nadat het personage van de jongen met de hoodie van de Yellow Submarine zijn opwachting maakte. Die jongen is een soort 'rain man' die autistische trekjes en kenmerken van het zogenaamde 'savantsyndroom' vertoont, waarmee hij o.a. alles wat hij leest en opmerkt onthoudt, maar geen emoties vertoont en bijna nooit praat. Murakami is voor mij een schrijver die heel overtuigend de teugels in handen houdt en uiterst nauwgezet schrijft. De ogenschijnlijk overbodige details en vooral de vele herhalingen die hij inlast, wekken niet zelden de indruk dat hij je als lezer nadrukkelijker en preciezer wil sturen dan andere schrijvers. Alsof hij weinig of niets aan de verbeelding van de lezer wil overlaten, om zich ervan te verzekeren dat je hem juist leest, op het autistische af, zou je kunnen zeggen. En dat zou volgens mij wel eens de reden kunnen zijn dat sommigen (zoals Connie Palmen) zijn boeken vreselijk vinden. Terwijl het voor mij eerder als een vorm van overgave aanvoelt aan die rigide Murakami-bezwering.

Die overgave kwam voor mij deze keer echter pas bij het begin van het middendeel, na zo'n kleine 200 pagina's. Het eerste deel mocht dan intrigerend zijn, het was mij toch vooral te langdradig en een tikkeltje saai. Bovendien stoorde ik me af en toe aan de vertaling. Naast het foutief gebruikte (want mannelijke) bezittelijke voornaamwoord voor de stad in de titel, kwam ik regelmatig passages tegen waarin onnodig tussen o.v.t. en o.t.t. geschakeld werd. Als dat omwille van de 'onvastheid' uit de titel opzettelijk zo zou zijn geschreven, had er wel een noot van de vertaler gestaan. Dus ja, een tikkeltje slordig.

Over de inhoud wil ik verder niet spoilen, maar voor mij was dit een klassieke, zeg maar doorsnee Murakami. In tegenstelling tot zijn vorige, verrassend originele Een Idea verschijnt/Metaforen verschuiven en mijn absolute favoriet De opwindvogelkronieken, vond ik 'De stad en zijn onvaste muren' geen hoogvlieger. En toch heb ik er graag en gretig in doorgelezen, precies zoals dat hoort bij een guilty pleasure.

[Javier Ventura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hace tiempo decidí no leer más a Murakami. Lo que empezó siendo una pasión memorable (Crónica del pájaro, Kafka y Tokyo Blues), se fue convirtiendo en cierta indiferencia no exenta de momentos placenteros (la caza del carnero, Sputnik) para acabar saturado primero con la excesiva e interminable 1Q84 y noqueado definitivamente con el Fin del Mundo.
Decía que ya había tenido yo suficiente Murakami, hasta que a un amigo (un buen amigo, todo hay que decirlo) se le ocurrió regalarme la novela que aquí nos ocupa. Joder, si yo no quería leer más Murakamis. Pero uno es de natural agradecido, y aquí que he estado buena parte del verano sufriendo una vez más con los habituales desadaptados sociales que protagonizan todas sus novelas, con sus Beatles, su música Jazz, sus gatos, sus suicidios, y como no podía ser de otra manera, una ración doble no, triple más bien, de sucesos inexplicables, fantasías oníricas, y momentos absurdos que no conducen a ningún sitio y para los que yo, ya, no tengo paciencia (si hasta unicornios tenemos en esta ocasión, madre de Dios).
Yo no quería leer más a Murakami, y esta ciudad y sus muros inciertos no ha hecho más que confirmar mi decisión.

[Anna Carina · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5 Sterne

Oh! Darling
Please believe me
I’ll never do you no harm
Believe me when I tell you
I’ll never do you no harm

Oh Darling
If you leave me
I’ll never make it alone…
[Beatles]

Murakami beweist mit diesem Buch wieder einmal seinen Blick und Hingabe für die Außenseiter der Gesellschaft. Leise Menschen, die im Lärm der Anderen untergehen. Die Beschädigten, voller Schmerz und Angst, vor sich selbst. Angst einen anderen zu beschädigen.
Er entführt uns in eine Art Nirwana der Friedfertigkeit. Das Buch ist von Anfang bis Ende ein Rückzug aus der Realität in die Illusion. Die Logik, die in der die Welt der Sprache angesiedelt ist, deren Grenzen, die Grenzen meiner Welt ausmachen, setzt Murakami aus.
Der Junge im Yellow-Submarine-Pullover liest Wittgensteins tractatus parallel zur isländischen Sagenwelt.
Die Ratio weicht der Intuition.
Die Welt der symbolischen Ordnung, der Sprache und Kultur, der sozialen Ordnung fordert ihren Tribut. Fragmentierung des Selbst, ein Gefühl des Mangels, Verlust des direkten Zugangs zu den wahren Wünschen und Bedürfnissen.
Dieser Mangel wird in voller Anerkennung von Murakami bespielt.
Und jetzt wird es problematisch. Ein Fosse in „Der Andere Name“ hat das gleiche Ziel: Hinein ins Reale, ran ans Unaussprechliche, Unmögliche. Auflösung der symbolischen Ordnung. Dafür müssen unsere Figuren feststecken, eine innere Erstarrung durchleben. In Mumis Fall durch das Nirwana der Friedfertigkeit bespielt. Dies muss zur Folge haben, dass die Welt in vereinfachte, dichotome Kategorien unterteilt ist. Fosse löst dies auf höchster literarischer Sprach- und Stilebene. Murakami löst dies, indem er uns eine Fahrt auf dem Kinderkarussel gewährt.
Es kommen solche Dialoge dabei rum:
„Vielleicht sehnten Sie sich tief in ihrem Herzen danach, die Stadt zu verlassen und auf diese Seite zurückzukehren.“
„Das würde also bedeuten, dass dieser Wille der stärker ist als mein eigener, nicht außerhalb von mir war, sondern in mir selbst?“
„Das ist natürlich nur eine haltlose persönliche Vermutung von mir. Aber nach Ihrer Geschichte kann ich es mir nicht anders vorstellen. Wahrscheinlich sind Sie freiwillig in diese unheimliche Stadt gegangen und aus freien Stücken zurückgekehrt. Diese Feder, die Sie zurückkatapultiert hat, muss eine besondere Kraft in Ihnen selbst sein. Der starke Wille tief in Ihnen hat dieses große Kommen und Gehen möglich gemacht. Auf einem Gebiet, das über Ihre Logik und Vernunft hinausreicht.“
„Woher wissen Sie das?“
„Das ist nur meine persönliche Meinung. Vielleicht stimmt es nicht. Aber ich habe es irgendwie im Urin (auch wenn es zweifelhaft ist, dass die Seele eines Verstorbenen Urin birgt).
Ja, so könnte es gewesen sein. Natürlich passiert es nicht jedem. Aber irgendwo und irgendwann kann es passieren. Wenn man einen starken Willen und ein reines Herz hat.“

Das Buch unterfordert maßlos. Es funktioniert aber über weite Strecken.
Insbesondere dort, wo wir in die Lebensgeschichten der Figuren abtauchen, den Jungen mit dem Yellow-Submarine-Pullover verfolgen, die Winterstimmung, die Atmosphäre in der Bibliothek in uns aufsaugen. Es ist so pastell: uneindeutig, zart, schwebend, fluffig, liebevoll, friedvoll.
Murakami verweigert sich sprachlich dem Schmerz. Er will heilen, weiß aber nicht wie.
Man gleitet fröhlich auf dieser rosa Zuckerwatte vor sich hin, bis „der Lauch im Bett“, einen mit einem Gongschlag zurückholt oder vor Zuckersirup triefende Tränke (Weisheiten) eines wirren Mirakulix gereicht werden – Sprachkitsch vom Feinsten.
Murakami arbeitet erstaunlich plakativ die Symbolik heraus. Ich kenne es von seinen Büchern, dass ich seinen magischen Realismus in der Imagination oft nicht kapiere. Er lässt es für sich stehen. Hier erklärt er ihn. Dies führt ua. zu diesen äußerst skurrilen Dialogen und Gedanken, die sich kindlich, naiv, vereinfacht darstellen. Ich verweise hier auf meinen Punkt des Feststeckens und der Konsequenz daraus zu Vereinfachen. Er muss dies so anlegen, um die Dauerflucht ins Imaginäre aufrechtzuerhalten. Dadurch verliert er den Anspruch und literarische Qualität. Den Preis den er für seine stilistischen, sprachlichen Entscheidungen zahlt, wie er die Vermittlung des Unbewussten angeht, das der Symbolisierung widersteht, ist meines Erachtens zu hoch.

Das Buch ist in 3 Teile gegliedert. Mit Teil 1 stolpert er äußerst unbeholfen in die Stadt mit der Mauer. Fällt mit der Tür ins Haus. Da rumpelt es sprachlich und kompositorisch übelst hart.
Teil 2 ist der längste und geglückt. Die von mir erwähnten Ausreißer ausgenommen.
Teil 3 schließt in sich das Buch rund ab und tunkt mich zum Ende nochmal tief in eingekochten Sprachkitsch, der klassisch philosophische Ideen in sprühendes, wirr tanzendes Konfetti der Selbstfindung verwandelt.

Ich muss mal warten wie gut das Buch einwirkt und was es noch mit mir macht, um über 3 Sterne nachzudenken. 2 Sterne sind hart. Ich weiß.

[Harun Ahmed]

"মাঝে মাঝে মনে হয় আমি যেন কারও, কোনো কিছুর ছায়া," এমনভাবে বললে যেন গোপন কোনো কথা ফাঁস করছো। "এখানে যে আমি আছি, তার কোনো অস্তিত্ব নেই, আমার আসল অস্তিত্ব কোথাও অন্য জায়গায়। এখানে যে আমি আছি, সে দেখতে আমার মতো হলেও আসলে মাটিতে বা দেওয়ালে পড়া আমার ছায়া মাত্র...এরকমই মনে হয় আমার।"

পরিচিত মনে হচ্ছে লাইনগুলো? আপনি মুরাকামির "hard boiled wonderland" পড়ে থাকলে একটু বেশিই পরিচিত মনে হবে কথাটা। আমি এখানে, আমার ছায়া অন্যখানে, আশ্চর্য এক শহর, সেখানে মানুষের শরীরে ছায়া নেই (প্রকারান্তরে তাদের আত্মা নেই), কিন্তু সেই ছায়ার আবার আলাদা অস্তিত্ব আছে, সেখান থেকে বের হওয়া যায় না - মনে হবে দেজাভু হচ্ছে। মুরাকামি পড়তে যেয়ে দেজাভুর অনুভূতি হওয়া অবশ্য দুর্লভ ব্যাপার নয়। কিন্তু এখানে একটু বেশিই হয় অনুভূতিটা। ভূমিকা পড়ে জানা গেলো, এই উপন্যাস আসলে hard boiled wonderland এরই আরেকটা বিকল্প বয়ান। শুরুতে প্রচুর মিল থাকলেও ধীরে ধীরে গল্প অন্যদিকে মোড় নেয়। মানুষের অস্তিত্ব নিয়ে দার্শনিক জিজ্ঞাসাই লেখার মূল উপজীব্য বলে মনে হয়েছে। যারা পূর্বোক্ত উপন্যাসটি পড়েছে তারা তুলনা করবে বাধ্য হয়ে। hard boiled wonderland  ছিলো টানটান, শেষ পর্যন্ত উত্তুঙ্গ আগ্রহ বজায় ছিলো পাঠকের। "অ-জানি শহর" এলানো, শিথিল কিন্তু গল্পের পরিণতি আগ্রহ জাগানিয়া। বারবার তুলনা এসে পড়ায় উপন্যাসটা আসলেই কতটুকু ভালো লাগলো তা নিয়ে আমি সন্দিহান কিন্তু মুরাকামির আগের উপন্যাস killing commendatore এর চাইতে এ বই তুলনামূলকভাবে সবল। তবে, মুরাকামি তার লেখার ধার আর ফেরত পাবেন বলে মনে হয় না। 

(অনুবাদ দারুণ। বেশ অবাক হয়েছি বলা যায়।)

[Oliver A · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at about 23%

I am a long-time fan of Murakami but this book is not good. Once the English version has been out for longer, I'll look up some more reviews and see if it's worth finishing, but everything until about page 100 is eye-rollingly boring. It's like Murakami distilled every weakness he had into this book, but none of his greatness.

×Middle-aged man pining over a teenager.
×The walking dates from Norwegian Wood without any of the substance.
×Describing a thing or place like it's the first time it's being mentioned. Every time it is mentioned.
×Mystical town is interesting in its premise but not in execution.
×Weridly bland prose and excessive use of parenthesis to overexplain things we don't need to know.

A far cry from the lofty heights Murakami is capable of. It's too frustrating to finish.

[The Speculative Shelf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Our main character inhabits two parallel worlds—one is the “real world,” and the other is a “dream world” reminiscent of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi: a nameless city with labyrinthine streets that feels disorienting yet mesmerizing.

The story is told in an understated and straightforward way, with little drama but plenty of pleasant imagery. Some elements felt downright cozy, though they lacked significant dramatic heft. The main character grapples with existential questions about his inner worldview and his sense of self, which are represented through the parallel worlds he experiences. Is the walled town a construct of his mind? A physical manifestation of the complex bond he shared with his first love? Who’s to say?

Murakami abandons the eponymous city for the “real world” early on, and the farther the narrative distances itself from that place, the harder it becomes—for both the main character and the reader—to return to what we once remembered. The plot clumsily attempts to weave these threads and worlds back together, but the resulting knot felt unsatisfying to me.

Many reviews have noted that Murakami has told similar stories more effectively in the past, so surely this is not the ideal book to start with as a Murakami neophyte—but here we are. I suspect I would connect better with his earlier works, as his writing and style resonated with me, but the story itself felt half-baked.

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

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[melissabastaleggere · Rating 4 out of 5]

sto vecchio giapponese bavoso bastardo scrive lo stesso libro da 50 anni eppure magicamente riesce sempre a farmi piangere sangue
ho fatto le 3 di mattina per finirlo e mi sento come quella volta che “no no ma è leggera” e sono andata in bianca
voi tt bn?

[Alexander Carmele · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mühsam verkitteter Allegorie-Exzess, oder wie Sprache gegen sich selbst kämpft und am Ende verliert. Seltsam nahe am Bedeutungsnirwana.

Ausführlicher, vielleicht begründeter auf kommunikativeslesen.com

Ob es an der Übersetzung liegt (mir wurde versichert, dass nicht), Stilist ist Haruki Murakami jedenfalls nicht. Auch in „Die Stadt und ihre ungewisse Mauer“ hakelt und radebricht es von Seite zu Seite im Stolperschritt:

„In diese diffusen Gedanken versunken, schritt ich durch die abendliche Dämmerung. Auf Höhe des Uhrturms warf ich gewohnheitsmäßig einen Blick auf die zeigerlose Uhr, die nicht die Zeit anzeigte, sondern deren Bedeutungslosigkeit veranschaulichte. Die Zeit ist nicht stehen geblieben, hat aber ihre Bedeutung verloren.“

Absätze wie diese konzentriert gelesen, fallen in sich zusammen. Wie kann etwas, das fehlt, eine Bedeutungslosigkeit veranschaulichen? Und was hat das Stehenbleiben der Zeit mit ihrer Bedeutung zu tun? Bei der Lektüre „Die Stadt und ihre ungewisse Mauer“ häufen sich solche Sätze, die entweder metonymisch Katachresen erzeugen oder letztlich tautologisch ineinander übergehen und die Erzählung auf der Stelle treten lassen:

„War ich dieses wahrere Ich geworden? War es – dieses Ich, das ich nun war – mein wahres Ich? Aber wer konnte schon beurteilen, ob er sein wahres Ich war oder nicht? Wie sollte man eindeutig zwischen einem Subjekt und einem Objekt unterscheiden, die miteinander verschmolzen waren? Je mehr ich darüber nachdachte, desto weniger begriff ich.“

Worum geht’s? Ein Ich-Erzähler verliebt sich in jungen Jahren. Das Mädchen verschwindet, bevor es aber verschwindet, imaginieren sie gemeinsam eine geheimnisvolle Stadt, in der sie gemeinsam leben und voneinander träumen könnten. Der Ich-Erzähler wächst auf, vergisst das Mädchen nie, und trifft fortan auf Repräsentanten seines jüngeren und älteren Ich. Es trifft auch auf Repräsentanten des jungen Mädchens, und all dies im Zusammenhang mit dem Leib-Seele-Problem, dem Unbewussten, dem Traum und der Frage, was ist ein Traum, was Wirklichkeit und eigentlich Fiktion?

„Ich weiß nicht, wie viel davon wahr ist und wie viel Fiktion. Aber die Stadt gewährt mir diese Freuden und Gefühlsregungen.“

Der Ich-Erzähler weiß sehr wenig. Er weiß nicht, wann er schläft, wann er träumt, was er fühlt, was er begehrt, was er sich wünscht. Er weiß nicht, Tod und Leben zu unterscheiden, Subjekt von Objekt zu trennen. Im Grunde lässt er sich treiben und will auch nichts anderes, als sich treiben zu lassen:

„»Sind Sie aus Tokio hierher in die Berge gezogen, um [die Liebe ihres Lebens] zu vergessen?«
Ich schüttelte lächelnd den Kopf. »Nein, so einen romantischen Grund hatte ich nicht. Egal, wo man ist, in der Stadt oder auf dem Land, es ist immer das Gleiche. Ich schwimme einfach mit dem Strom.«“

„Die Stadt und ihre ungewisse Mauer“ will niemandem ans Leder. Der Roman entzieht sich allen Fragen, allen Bedeutungsebenen. Friedlich, geruhsam, sanftmütig schleicht der Ich-Erzähler durch die Nächte, den Winter, während Schnee unter seinen Schuhen knirscht. Er wünscht sich eine andere Welt. Er wünscht sich Zauber, Mystik und Transzendenz, Einhörner, Gespenster und auch Blaubeermuffins. Leider findet das alles nicht zusammen.

Es besitzt Stellen, die komisch sind, wie Halldór Laxness‘ „Am Gletscher“, in denen ebenfalls die Transzendenz und das Leben nach dem Tod verhandelt werden. Es enthält etwas von Alfred Kubins Traumwelt „Die andere Seite“, in der das Unbewusste sich zeigt und wütet (martialisches Prokreation der Einhörner, bspw). Und es besitzt das Impressionistische von Joshua Groß‘ „Prana Extrem“, und das Dunkle, Wiederkehrende von Jon Fosses „Der andere Name. Heptalogie I–II“.

Im Grunde wirft Murakamis Sprache aber das weiße Handtuch. Er will nicht festgelegt werden, und niemanden festlegen. Er will einfach lauschen, spazieren gehen, vor sich hindümpeln und in Ruhe gelassen werden. „Die Stadt und ihre ungewisse Mauer“ lädt zu einer leeren, fröhlichen, sinnlosen Fahrt ein – und das wirre Erzählen, na ja, es ersetzt einfach die Stille, so dass es noch nicht einmal ärgerlich ist.

[Andrew Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m a huge fan of Murakami’s writing, but there are times he can leave me nonplussed. His longer fiction has provided me with a number of sublime reading/listening experiences (Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, Norwegian Wood). But he can also confuse and lose me (A Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance, After Dark). I was really hoping that this, his fifteenth novel, would provide a rich and thought-provoking experience, in line with what I consider to be his finest novels. Unfortunately, the thought it provoked was ‘what the hell is he talking about’. Yes, this definitely isn’t one of my favourites.

I’m not sure I can do the plot justice, as I really struggled to get a handle on it. I’d almost suggest that there really is no plotline here, just an unsatisfying series of events and wonderings. It begins with a young man, Baku, meeting and falling in love with a teenage girl. They spend a good deal of time together, though their relationship is strictly non-sexual. But one day, she disappears. Remembering that the girl had said that she came from another town that was difficult, if not impossible, to access, Baku reluctantly accepts that he might never see her again. But years later, when he’s middle-aged, Baku decides to take a job in a remote library (the girl had told him that she worked in a library) and through a series of events I’d find hard to describe he is eventually transported to the town where the girl (still sixteen years of age) lives and works. There are lots of strange things about this town that I won’t delve into.

Call it surreal or magical realism if you will, but I just found it confusing. More than that, I just couldn’t grasp the message of the story if there is one to be grasped. In his ‘afterward’ the author talks about how this story grew from a short story he wrote and published only in a magazine many years ago. It’s also worth noting that this tale is significantly shorter in pages than the original Japanese language version. Is there something missing in translation that might explain why this novel is so lacking in structure and punch? I’ve really no idea. Just about the only positive I can draw from my experience with the audio version I listened to is that it does have a calming, almost meditative, rhythm that I found soothing (almost sleep inducing).

I did at least struggle through to the finish, so my self-imposed rating system tells me that it’s a two star rating for me.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Regardless of the contents, he seemed fond of longer books.

A line about one of the characters that rather sums up this unnecessary novel.

As Murakami explains in an afterword, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (of course, all titles that follow are those of the English translations) started as a novella (or long short story) in 1980, when he was 31. He'd planned to expand it into a longer piece, but wrote The Wild Sheep Chase instead and then in 1985 published Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a blending of two stories, one set in the world of the novella and a more hard-boiled tale.

For reasons he doesn't really explain, he'd wanted to revisit the story - and started to do so in 2020 and originally wrote it as a novella (or short novel) that constitutes Part I of this work - a sensible 127 pages. But then for reason he also doesn't really explain, expanded in into this 445 page tome.

It's clearly given Murakami great satisfaction but I'm not sure it warranted publication - I read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World 25+ years ago but this felt very similar.

And perhaps this reflect its origins in his first book, but it feels an immature, almost adolescent work, with the inventiveness that marks the author as his best replaced by a cod philosophy that reads more like Paulo Coelho.

And the writing ... the Guardian's review neatly skewers the oddly repetitive nature of the text, and Murakami's rather sledgehammer approach to the novel's motifs and references, as if the reader can't be trusted to follow their own reading of the text. Could the walled city of the text be in dialogue with Miyazaki's later movies? Well better make sure the reader gets the hint:

"Dad says it's like he was spirited away, the Older brother said.
" Spirited away ," I said.
"Yes, apparently in this region in the past something like being spirited away took place. Usually it was young children suddenly vanishing for no apparent reason, and never coming back. There are some legends about it. Dad said maybe that could have happened, because there's no other good explanation for it."
"Assuming it's a case of being spirited away ," I said, "is there some way to get the children back?"

Or in case the reader doesn't get which bits are magical and which bits real (thanks for that bit in brackets, it really elevates the paragraph, and does help educate the reader)

I crouched in front of the stove, lit a match, lit balled-up news-papers, and with that some thin firewood, and then on to thicker pieces, gradually getting the fire going. Sometimes it didn't go well, and I had to start over. It was a solemn operation, like some kind of ceremony. Something people had, from ancient times, continued to perform (though of course there were no matches or newspapers back in the past).

Or this penetrating insight into world literature:

"In his stories the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, are all mixed together in one," she said. "Like that's an entirely ordinary, everyday thing.
"People often call that magical realism," I said.
"True. But I think that although that way of telling stories might fit the critical criteria of magical realism, for García Márquez himself it's just ordinary realism. In the world he inhabits the real and the unreal coexist and he just describes those scenes the way he sees them."

The book does, I think, cross off most of the entries on the Murakami Bingo card, including the objectified female characters) but in a perfunctory way, and I didn't have the patience to document them.

On the positive side, Murakami knows how to spin a tale, and the book held my interest for a decent period of time. But it was hard not to feel like the narrator (and NB why the skirt?):

This old man, always decked out in a skirt, wearing a wristwatch without hands-what did this enigmatic person signify? I won-dered. It felt like there was a kind of message involved. A message meant for me... But as I pondered all this I grew terribly drowsy, and fell asleep.

Hopefully he's worked this out of his system, and there is better to follow.

[Óscar Moreno (OscarBooker) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Al autor de este libro le tomó 40 años darle forma a esta historia. Casi medio siglo para agregar más y más carne. Se nota. Es una novela con múltiples matices que juega con el lector y lo reta constantemente.

Realmente no tengo ningún “pero” para este libro. El personaje de Koyazu es precioso y ansío poder abrazarlo. El de el niño “Yellow submarine” me parece muy cercano y vivido.

Hasta este momento, en que escribo estas palabras, tengo una lista escrita a mano con siete preguntas para interpretar todo el simbolismo. Me queda claro que hubo influencia de “Alicia y el país de las maravillas” pero este mundo de Murakami es más profundo o al menos eso lo parece.

Se mezclan temas como la muerte, las enfermedades mentales, la identidad, ausencia de empatía/amor, la vida, la creatividad o la esperanza.

Tengo que sentarme a repensar las notas mentales de esta lectura pues es sumamente rica e interesante. No encuentro excusa para no darle la calificación máxima en esta aplicación.

[Hamad · Rating 2 out of 5]

“However—there isn’t just one reality. Reality is something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives.”

A few years back, I picked up Kafka on the Shore at a local bookstore that had a very limited English selection. I’d heard a lot about Murakami -mostly that his books are strange- but I never felt in the right mood for him until recently. After seeing a YouTube video that piqued my interest, I bought a hardcover and dove in.

From the beginning, it was… weird. I partly blame myself; magical realism has never really clicked with me. It often feels like a convenient excuse to not explain things, and that always rubs me the wrong way. The story felt disjointed, hard to follow, and I wasn't sure if the two narrative worlds were meant to be literal, metaphorical, or both.

Still, I kept going, especially after reading a review saying it starts to make more sense after page 200. And honestly, that person was right. Around that point, things became clearer and more engaging.

During my reading, I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole and learned more about Murakami’s recurring themes (like his oddly frequent mentions of earlobes) and some unsettling choices, like the way he writes about adolescent sexuality, which felt even more uncomfortable knowing his age (70+) when he wrote this.

The novel often felt like a psychedelic trip (Is this what LSD feels like?) metaphor-heavy, dreamlike, and at times nonsensical. Some characters, like the asexual librarian and the savant child, felt underdeveloped, like decorative pieces rather than meaningful threads in the narrative. Repetition also wore me down, especially given the book’s length.

After finishing it, I dove into reviews and Reddit threads, only to find that many readers agree this may not be the best starting point for Murakami. Still, I’m curious. I plan to give Norwegian Wood a try next to see if his more grounded work resonates with me better.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 4 out of 5]

[4.25]
One of the reasons I read is that I believe humanity is held together by stories. And that is what Murakami’s novel here is largely about. Parallel worlds exist—one that requires you to give up your shadow to inhabit. Why does the main protagonist want to give up his shadow and live in a world where nobody knows him? Why—love, of course. He has fallen in love with a girl that, like him, loves to read and write and walk and talk--and is always curious. She tells him of a walled world, one he can live in as a “dream reader” at a library, and she would be there, too (although she won’t know him anymore). Love, desire, curiosity, and the need for a meaningful life is the foundation of this novel.

It's not quite a slow burn but it’s a leisurely one that takes it’s time to build. Speaking of time, the clocks in the walled world don’t have hands, just the dial with numbers. Eventually, the unnamed narrator decides to leave his prestigious job in Tokyo to follow a different path. By now, he’s 45. He moves to the rural mountains and becomes a head librarian at a library with no books. Yeah, does that make sense? It will, when his job reading old dreams is revealed. There, the girl he loves works at this library—she hasn’t aged, though, she is still sixteen.

This is a book Murakami published as a novella in a magazine 40 years ago, and he decided to tweak it, work on it, grow it, feed it, and turn it into a 450+ page novel for 2023 (and translated in English 2024). I can’t imagine this as a novella; I loved every page. Sure, he could have condensed it again and still given his readers a scintillating narrative. But, for readers like me who want to follow enigmatic characters for an unending span of time, and abide by their haunted memories; strange dreams; vanished shadows; and eccentric identity, you have arrived at the most fitting place. Prior to this title, the book was shaped into End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Fans may remember.

Moreover, it is one of the rare novels that can get away with telling and exploring dreams within the narrative. Dreams in context tend to annoy and bore me, but Murakami is an exceptional writer who actually heightens the story with his characters’ disclosed, colorful dreams. The blurring of reality and fantasy is the bedrock of the plot and themes.

Murakami occasionally veers into the heavy-handed style of showing, then telling, and then telling once again, retelling and pondering an event that would be best left to the reader to interpret and conclude. Is it because Murakami doesn’t trust the reader to figure things out, or that he doesn’t trust himself to get an exchange over the finish line? I’d love to ask him one day, as this is habitual with Murakami. However, it was less of an occurrence here than in some of his other books. Regardless, I was immersed in this story of a time “…neither you nor I had names.” Imaginative and hallucinatory, it’s a piercing story of two worlds. In the shadowless world, “Not everyone can enter. You need special qualifications to do that.”

The shape-shifting walls and the unicorns that live outside them in this other city will lure you in and make you dare to wonder—would I give up my shadow for love in this strange city? The nameless teenaged narrator and the book-loving girl that stole his heart aren’t easily forgotten by the reader when the last page is finished. “…silence and nothingness, as always, were my constant companions…”

[Barbara K · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has occurred to me that one reason I’ve been drawn to reading more books of magical realism in recent years is that their sense of the amorphous line between reality and otherness mirrors the world we live in. Political leaders subscribe to the theory that by assigning truth/non-truth labels, they can alter our perception of reality. And the incredibly rapid developments in artificial intelligence presage a frightening future in which the only reality we can be absolutely sure of is what we can touch, smell and taste. Seeing and hearing are already marginalized, and the other three are probably doomed.

Thank god for books, where the words are what they are.

My only other Murakami to date has been Kafka on the Shore, which I found brilliant. I own copies of two others of his books, and I anticipate reading his entire canon eventually.

That absence of familiarity with his previous books leaves me at something of a loss when it comes to assessing how The City compares with his earlier work. What I can say is that the pacing is remarkably different from Kafka. It is extremely slow moving - unbearably so at times. That said, there are a number of intriguing characters - Mr. Koyasu and The Yellow Submarine Boy among others - and the third part smoothly and satisfyingly brings together all the pieces introduced in the Parts 1 and 2.

So what is it about? Beats me. Sometimes I don’t want to analyze the author’s intentions in a novel like this. It’s enough to let it wash over me, infuse me with ideas that don’t necessarily have to be integrated at every step along the way, but are meaningful on their own.

This will describe it in part:

”However—there isn’t just one reality. Reality is something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives.”

And then there is this, from Mukarami’s Afterward, in which he describes the genesis of the book:

“Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change and movement. Isn’t this the quintessential core of what stories are all about? At least that’s how I see it.”

LBC

[Bam cooks the books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can we create our own reality? Murakami delves into alternative possibilities in his latest fascinating and inventive novel. The story is told by a male narrator who remains unnamed. He meets a beautiful young girl from a different city at a ceremony where each is receiving a writing award. Although they see each other only on rare occasions after that, they write long letters and fall in love. One day she tells him about a city enclosed by a high wall where her 'real' self lives. As they talk, they go on 'to create and share a special, secret world of [their] own.' Then one day the girl just vanishes and is heard from no more.

This story is so wondrous! Woven into it are dreams, shadows, ghosts, unicorns, the meaning of time and so much more. The author's flowing writing style kept me turning pages; the ending left me with much to think about.

In an Afterword, Murakami tell us he first published this story as a novella back in 1980 as a young writer but always felt it deserved more, and now 40 years later, he has rewritten or, as he says, 'perhaps completed,' The City and Its Uncertain Walls. I highly recommend to those who enjoy this kind of rich fantasy story that takes the reader deep into the unknown.

Many thanks to the author and publisher for providing me with an arc of this new novel via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.

[Marc *Dark Reader with a Thousand Young! Iä!* · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no idea what it was about, but damn was it delightfully melancholy and beautiful.