Haruki Murakami's The City And Its Uncertain Walls expands an early novella to diminishing returns

Much of Haruki Murakami’s new novel, The City And Its Uncertain Walls, will feel familiar to longtime readers of the Japanese writer’s work. There’s a missing young woman; a sense of adolescent longing protracting into middle age; references to vintage jazz, classical music, and the Beatles; appearances by such fixations as cats, whiskey, bachelor cooking, and secret passageways; weird stuff involving ears. And at the center of the story, there’s a fantastical town surrounded by an impenetrable brick wall, where the clocks have no hands, unicorns roam the streets, and the library is stocked with old dreams. In order to enter, one must relinquish their shadow, as none of the residents are allowed to have one.

This same surreal town was one of the main settings of Murakami’s 1985 breakthrough novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World, though, as he explains in an afterword, it originated in an even earlier novella, also called “The City And Its Uncertain Walls.” (It’s one of Murakami’s most obscure works, and has never been republished or translated.) The new novel, which Murakami began writing during the early months of the Covid pandemic, represents his second attempt at expanding that (apparently unsatisfying) early story. 

There is, of course, an irresistible Murakami-ness to this idea of a writer, now in his mid-seventies, returning to the unfinished business of his younger self, paralleling the plots of many of his novels (this one included). In this version of the story, the town is a seemingly imaginary place, a kind of parable of teenage angst told to the narrator by his first girlfriend on a twilit summer evening long ago. As the girl (who, like the narrator, is never named) explains, the town is where her “real” self resides. She—or the version of her the narrator knows—is only the shadow that was left behind. 

The first part of The City And Its Uncertain Walls (there are three) is written in the second person, with the girl addressed as “you.” She and the narrator meet in a high-school essay-writing competition sponsored by a pen company: He gets third place with an essay about his cat, and she gets fourth with an essay about her grandmother. They live in different towns, and decide to write letters to each other: He writes about school and the swim team, and she writes back with fictional stories and descriptions of her dreams. Once or twice a month, they take the train to see each other. Their romance is entirely emotional; according to the narrator, it never progresses past  “hugging and kissing.” Then, after one last cryptic letter, she disappears without a trace. 

Running parallel to this is a dreamlike second story, in which the narrator travels to the town described by the girl. It turns out to be a dull, desolate, somewhat dystopian place; there is no electricity, and everyone’s clothes are patched and shabby. The narrator has come to take a position as a “Dream Reader” at the library where the girl’s true self works. He is now in his mid-forties, while she is eternally sixteen. They settle into a nightly routine: She makes him bitter tea and lights a canola oil lamp, and he reads old dreams (described as vaguely egg-shaped). Of course, she doesn’t recognize him; it was her missing shadow that he fell in love with. Occasionally, he goes to visit his own shadow (depicted as sentient and basically humanoid), which is slowly fading into oblivion as it waits for him at the entrance to the city.

There are long chunks of The City And Its Uncertain Walls that speak to Murakami’s considerable gifts as a writer—his depictions of longing and ennui and the ways in which our lives can seem haunted by trivialities (say, a song you can’t remember the name of) and the riddles of the past and the unconscious. He gets how the unsolved and unanswered can take on more meaning the longer it teases us. But the comparatively deft first part of the novel eventually gives way to a much longer and more monotonous second. 

Returning from the dreamworld of the town, the narrator experiences a mid-life crisis, leaving his career at a Tokyo book distributor to take a job as a head librarian in a small community enclosed by mountains. There, he settles into a quiet new routine and is befriended by his retired predecessor, Mr. Koyasu, an elderly eccentric who walks around dressed in a blue beret and a skirt. There are enigmatic echoes of the dreamworld and discussions of the Borgesian-sounding concept of an “ideal library.” Eventually, the narrative turns into a drawn-out, increasingly repetitive ghost story with a side of amateur detective work, with more and more pages taken up with the narrator interviewing other characters. 

Along the way, two more major characters enter the picture: a young autistic savant known only as Yellow Submarine Boy, and the thirty-something proprietor of the local coffee shop, with whom the narrator begins a relationship that turns out to be as sexless as his romance with the girl who disappeared all those decades ago. In typical Murakami fashion, the narrative resists linear development, preferring to refract, divide, and multiply: There are two libraries, two lonely towns, two women who won’t sleep with the protagonist, and, eventually, two missing teenagers.

We are meant to wonder which life or reality is the really real one—the narrator asks some version of this question several times over. But after a while, a kind of creakiness becomes evident, as the redundancies take over and Murakami’s well-cataloged writerly weaknesses begin to take up more and more space in the prose: the occasionally hokey similes (“The cold that presaged snow squeezed my consciousness hard, like an arm of steel”), the cursory literary allusions, the music references. Somewhere past the midway point of the novel, the narrator reveals a hitherto unmentioned interest in 1950s American jazz and Russian classical music and starts name-checking saxophonists and composers. (The Beatles digressions are at least funny: “We all live in a yellow submarine… It means something, and at the same time, it doesn’t.”) Further along, there is an honest-to-goodness discussion of the concept of “magical realism” that is enough to make even a devoted Murakami reader groan. 

As in many of his novels, including the great ones, it all ends up teetering on the edge of incoherence. (The shorter third part, which feels like a tacked-on epilogue, doesn’t help matters). The truth is that the experience of reading a good Murakami novel is not altogether different from the experience of reading an underwhelming one like The City And Its Uncertain Walls: It’s a sort of frustration that mimics the inner motives of his protagonists, who are often fruitlessly searching for an answer or a more satisfying ending to some irresolvable plot. The difference is that, while Murakami’s best work rewards our frustrations and mystifications by revealing something about them, this exercise in self-recycling ends up feeling stagnant.