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Haruki Murakami:とその不確かな (The City and Its Uncertain Walls)

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the afterword to this book, Murakami explains the genesis of it. It was originally a novella, published in a magazine and never subsequently republished. However he says from the first I felt that this work contained something vital for me.. Part of it was repurposed in the second part of his novel 世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World). As he gained more experience as a writer, he felt more confident about giving it another go and, during the covid pandemic, he set to work. It took him thee years.

Like all the characters in this book, our narrator is not named. At the start of the novel he is a seventeen year old schoolboy. He has won a prize in an essay competition. The theme of the essay was My Friend. He is an only child and a loner and he has no friends, so he wrote about his cat. At the prize-giving he met a sixteen year old schoolgirl. She is also an only child and a loner. She wrote about her grandmother. They chat and agree to write to one another. Later they decide to meet. He pretends to his parents that he is going to the library to study. They meet and write regularly. While they do kiss, he does not want to take it any further.Very soon their main topic of conversation is a mysterious, seemingly imaginary town. She maintains that her real self is there and what he sees now is only a shadow of her real self. However we learn about the town from her description but also, told concurrently with the story of the two of them, told in alternating chapters, is his arrival at the town. How he got there we do not know till later.

He wants to go to meet the real her but she warns him that if he does the real her will not recognise him. To get there he only has yo imagine he is there. She tells him about her dreams and, if he does go the town, he should become the Dream Reader. She is the Librarian.

Suddenly her letters stop. Then, after four months a long one arrives. It will be the last letter he ever receives from her. In this letter she tells him that she has episodes where her heart goes rigid and she stays in her room, missing school. A huge wave rolls over me, without a sound, I’m swallowed up.

She had told him I want to be your. “Completely, totally yours. So he cannot understand what has happened to her. Phone calls only go to a This number is out of service message and, when he goes to the house, the name on the door is not hers.

So he gets on with his life. He goes to university, has girlfriends but nothing serious, gets a decent job but, to his parents’ disappointment, doed not marry and have children.

He is now in his mid-forties and then it happens as we had read about earlier. He is in the town. Once you go through this gate, you can never leave the Gatekeeper tells him. Moreover, he cannot take his shadow into the town and it is removed and lives elsewhere. He becomes the Dream Reader. This involves going yo the library, which has the dreams and where, as we know, she is the librarian. As we also know she does not recognise him. We learn a lot more about the town and its anomalies, including the eponymous uncertain walls. Nothing much seems to happen in the town which clearly had had at one time a much larger population, What happened we do not know. Everyone seems reserved with one exception – his shadow. The shadow. The shadow, separated from him, is fading fast and wants out. He even knows a way out and almost but not quite persuades our hero to escape with him. While the shadow does escape, our hero stays behind but, suddenly, without explanation, he is back in the real world and back at his job. All is explained later in the book.

However he does not like the real world nor his job so he quits and becomes head librarian in a small town in Fukushima. He enjoys the job and and gets on with his his predecessor who continues to advise him and who founded and funded the library. The predecessor (male) wears skirts and has an analogue watch with no hands. Only later does our hero learn that predecessor the has been dead for many years. Not surprisingly he can see that our hero once lost his shadow. However there are two other key characters in the town. Our hero has a fling with a woman who finds sex physically painful. More particularly there is a regular visitor to the library, a sixteen year old boy whose name is given as M** but who he knows as Yellow Submarine Boy as he has a green parka with a picture from The Yellow Submarine film on it. The boy has dropped out of school and is a total loner. He has no friends and barely communicates with his parents and older brothers. Not surprisingly, he seems to knows about the city with uncertain walls and wants to go there.

This may well be something Murakami aways wanted to write but I do not think it works very well for various reasons. Firstly, there is a thin line between magic realism and fantasy, including whimsical fantasy, and I feel that all too often this book falls on the wrong side of the line. There is nothing wrong with (whimsical) fantasy, of course, but it is not what we expect from Murakami. One of his characters is reading Gabriel García Márquez‘s El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera). Our hero comments 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. I am not sure that is true. Whether it is or not, I cannot seriously believes tha Murakami sees the world as it appears in this book. In other words he is not writing magic realism but fantasy.

Secondly, as we know this is something of a rewrite of an earlier work and I get the feeling he is trying not only to take that story but other stories and cram them into this one novel. It does not really work for me.
Thirdly we have some plot strands which seem to be left hanging at the end as though he felt he has written too much (the book is nearly 500 pages long) and abandoned them or even forgot them.

Don’t let me put you off. It is Murakami and he has written a fantasy which may well please a lot of his readers but not so much this one.

Publishing history

First published by Shinchosha Publishing Co
First English translation in 2024 by Knopf
Translated by Philip Gabriel