The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami (Book Review)

The City & Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami Published Date Japan, April 13, 2023, Shinchosha and November 19, 2024 Knopf

The Master of Magical Realism Returns! Haruki Murakami’s most recent release The City and Its Uncertain Walls follows a man who finds himself torn between two worlds: the real world and a “fantasy” world. As a teen in the real world, the man fell into a deep, profound love with a girl from a different town. They wrote to each other weekly, and when they had free time they spent all of it with each other, talking about everything from literature to music. One day she confides to him that she is actually a shadow, and that her real self is in a city surrounded by a wall. In that city, she works in a library with a clock that has no hands, and where she assists the towns Dream Reader. In that city, there is no concept of linear time, unicorns roam the plains outside the wall, and the only way you can enter this city is to have your shadow removed by the Gatekeeper who guards the only entrance. When she suddenly and mysteriously disappears, however, the man has no choice but to continue on with his life. Before he knows it, he is a middle-aged bachelor, and though he has tried, he is unable to settle down with anyone else, his heart still yearning for his first and only love. He aches to find the city surrounded by the high wall, determined to shed his shadow and join that world where he can reunite with his beloved once again. But how does one journey from the real world to one of fantasy? And is the cost of admission into The City and Its Uncertain Walls too high?

I’m going to be honest with you my dear readers, my summary of this novel does not do it proper justice. The story is so complex that I cannot summarize it in a traditional sense. I can never fully convey the power behind the magic Murakami performs with words.

Before I dive into my review. There is some history to The City and Its Uncertain Walls. As Murakami explains in the afterward of the book, part of the narrative is derived from a story Murakami wrote early in his career. He was never satisfied with it when it was first published in a literary magazine, feeling it was not fully formed. Later on, he revisited the story in his 1985 Cyberpunk/Fantasy themed novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Though he says he had a lot of fun writing it, and even though the book was successful, Murakami still was not satisfied. He knew he wanted the two narratives to connect at the end, and, though he was successful in doing so, he personally still felt like he had “a fish bone caught in [his] throat.” Decades later, during the pandemic, Murakami used this existential time in our lives to revisit the world he created as a 36 year old. It took him a few years to complete his vision. The result: The City and Its Uncertain Walls.

When I started to read The City and Its Uncertain Walls, I felt like I had read it before. Part of this story, the fantastical portion, is ripped straight from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. A man reaches the end of the world, in a land crawling with one horned beasts, in a city surrounded by a high wall. He is assigned to work in the library, tasked with being the towns Dream Reader, a very important job in that town, but before he can enter the city, he must abandon his shadow, and leave it with the Gatekeeper of the city. I knew where the story was going because I already knew all of this from Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. What I didn’t understand was why Murakami chose to retell this story.

I’m not going to lie, part of me felt cheated as a reader. I was so excited to read a new story by Murakami. To open it and find that the story is a rehash of something he’d done decades ago, left me - understandably - a bit disappointed. But the more I read on, the more I began to understand. This is nothing like Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

As I said before, the two narratives in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World just didn’t make sense to me. It felt like I was reading two stories. The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a perfect union of both narratives. They don’t just connect at the end, they are invariably intertwined from start to finish. Granted, yes, the question of whether you are following the man or his shadow does become a bit tricky if you take your eye off the thread you’re following. However, knowing that they are essentially the same person makes the story much more fluid as it shape-shifts.

The story is told in three parts.

In Part One, we are introduced to the main character, his girlfriend, and the concept of the land of the city behind the wall. When the girlfriend disappears, he remembers that she said her real self was in that town and he ventures out to find her.

In Part Two (and perhaps the best portion of the book because it is here where we spend the most time with the man and the cast of characters), the man, now middle-aged, abandons his stable, status-quo life in exchange for life in a small rural town, but instead of it being enclosed by walls like the dream-like town, it is actually surrounded by mountains. He is drawn to work in a local library where he’s made the head librarian, overseeing the day to day needs of the library. He begins to make a life there, but he still yearns for the fantasy world.

Part Three brings us back to that "fantasy" world where everything finally comes to a head.

One important factor to note going into this novel is that, though the disappearance of the man’s girlfriend is vital to the story, the book is not about the mystery of her sudden disappearance, but about the impact that that disappearance has on the main character as he grows in to middle-aged adulthood. It is the catalyst that makes the man grapple with his identity, his emptiness, loneliness, and the piece of him that remains out of reach, lost to the black void in his heart.

The character’s that inhabit the world pair perfectly around the main character, from Mrs. Soeda, the no nonsense librarian that is basically second in command to the main character in the library, Mr. Koyasu, the eccentric owner of the library with a tragic history (and my favorite element of the book), to The Boy with the Yellow Submarine Parka and yes, the Girlfriend who vanishes like smoke.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is 464 pages long, but I was so engrossed in the story that the pages turned quickly. By the time I reached Part Two of the story, it no longer felt like a story I knew. I no longer knew how it might end. It felt like - yes - I was reading a new book. It has all of the elements that are essentially Murakami: Main character giving up status quo life, stability, for one of uncertainty, as they grapple with existential issues, magical elements, and references to pop culture, with Japan as always the backdrop of the story.

And to touch on that. Another reason I love Murakami’s stories is that even though they are set in Japan, and the characters are Japanese, you do not have to be Japanese to relate to these characters or the story. Their issues are timeless and universal. They transcend culture and nationality. It all falls in place like a vivid puzzle of wild cherry blossoms: Beautifully.

That is not to say the book does not have its faults. I didn’t feel like the actual act of dream reading was explored enough. At the end of the day, I don’t know what the act signified, its importance, or if it was a metaphor for something deeper. It is quite possible that this has to do with my own literary ignorance.

Also, and this is perhaps my biggest gripe with the book, there is this thing Murakami does in this book that becomes irritating. Characters will go through lines and/or paragraphs of explaining something to a another character, and then when the person is done explaining, the other character will then turn around and repeat the same thing, confirming they got the details and facts right, and understood their order correctly.

It feels like filler. Like Murakami was sitting at his typewriter trying to meet a word quota for the day. This happens a lot in the book. Not as much as you might think, but enough times to notice. I literally started skipping paragraphs because I knew the information already even if the character was slow on the uptake. I don’t know if this was done purposely to give us the illusion of stagnant time but after a while it got annoying.

Also, the characters are all very formal and sound the same. So when the dialogue is written and often times there is no tag at the end of it as they speak in turns, you lose sight of who is speaking because there is nothing distinctive about their personalities and manner of speaking. It is all very formal and proper and I don’t know if that is the translation or if it’s because these traits are innately Japanese.

All that aside, there is nothing I can point to that I can honestly say that made me dislike this story. It’s not his best work, but it's still a magical journey. All in all, I consider The City and Its Uncertain Walls to be a much better version than Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It stands all on its own.

That being said, if you are new to the world of Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls may turn you off. Mainly because the way the story ebbs and flows from the main character to the shadow version and so forth. It is very easy to grow frustrated with the thread and let go of the rope completely.

The ending is left to interpretation. You have to do some homework to make it make sense. It does, I assure you, but you may not like having to do the extra credit work. Remember this isn’t a straight laced mystery about a missing woman. It is a story about love, loss, and loneliness. How to cope with it, how it can consume you and leave you in darkness when you willing resign yourself to it, and how there is still hope to come out on the other side. Ultimately the choice is yours.

Naturally, art is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What I read may resonate with me more than the next person. It’s true of all art forms. If you listen to a certain song, there is something about it that when it sonically hits your ears, you can’t explain why it moves you - you just know that it does. There is something embedded deep within it’s core that you relate to. That’s how I feel about Murakami. Every time I finish reading one of his stories, I feel like the doors and windows to the house of my soul have flown wide open, letting in a much needed, refreshing, cleansing breeze. I say all this being well aware that as an author you either love him, or think he’s alright. And that’s fine. As Murakami once wrote:

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

At the end of the day, what we look for in art are the ideas that challenge our fixed beliefs of the mechanics of existence and socielty, and reflect how we understand and experience the world around us.

You cannot say Magical Realism without thinking of the name Haruki Murakami, and in this stage of his career as a novelist, Murakami’s mastery of the genre remains unparalleled.