Given the nature of Haruki Murakami’s newest work, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, it’s particularly apt that I’m of two minds with regards to the book. Possibly three minds, which is equally apropos considering the novel’s tri-part structure. Maybe even … no, let’s just stop at three.
While I labeled it Murakami’s newest work, a more accurate description might be newish, as large parts are a reworking of his earlier novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), itself a reshaping of an even earlier novella (Murakami runs through an explanation of all this in a brief afterword). I’ll leave parsing the specific similarities and differences among the three versions to some grad student’s future thesis. Suffice to say that Murakami hasn’t simply extended the earlier works, turning a long short story into a novel and then that novel into an even longer one simply by adding more plot. He’s working with the same subject, yes, but using a different palette, opting for a little less science fiction here, a little more melancholy there. If you’ve read Hard-Boiled Wonderland, you’ll recognize its bones here, but it won’t feel like a lazy rehashing of the same story. On the flip side, not having read the prior novel won’t have any impact on your experience with this one; you’ll be equally befuddled either way.
As noted, the story is presented in three parts. The first opens with our unnamed narrator relating how he and a girl he addresses as “you” fell in love as teens one summer. Early in their relationship, she tells him about a town “surrounded by a high wall so it’s very hard to enter … And going out is even harder.” There, she says, the “real” her lives, the person now with him being merely a “stand-in. Like a wandering shadow.” If he wants to meet the real her, he’ll have to get to the town. The good-news/bad-news is that he “has the qualifications” to enter and even become the town’s reader of old dreams in the same library she works at, but she unfortunately won’t know him, as the real her and he wouldn’t have met. Part One then alternates between two tracks: one details their mostly idyllic summer together up to the time the girl suddenly disappears, followed by a brisk recap of the subsequent lonely years until he turns forty-five; the other relates the narrator’s time in the walled town where he meets the girl once again, though she is still sixteen and he is now a grown man (as forewarned, she doesn’t recognize him). The section ends with the narrator choosing to stay in the walled town and allow his shadow, which had to be severed from him to enable entry into town, to return to the “real world.”
Part Two finds the narrator back in our world, though how and why is a mystery to him. Grieving his loss and feeling wholly unmoored—“I simply felt that this reality wasn’t suited to me”—he quits his work and takes a new job as director of a small library in a rural mountain town under the mentorship of Mr. Koyasu, the library’s founder, former director, and current ghost. Eventually, the narrator starts seeing a woman who runs the local coffee shop, and he also befriends an autistic teen referred to as the Yellow Submarine Boy thanks to his favorite t-shirt. When the boy overhears the narrator speaking of the town, he becomes determined to go there himself and take on the role of Dream Reader, while the narrator struggles with the ethics of helping him.
Part Three returns us to the town, where the narrator (or some version of him) has been working as the Dream Reader in the library where the girl of his youth works. He spots Yellow Submarine Boy on the street (though he doesn’t know who he is, having not met him in this reality), and when they finally interact the boy tells the narrator the two have to “merge” into one being so the boy can become the Dream Reader. They do so, and after a brief time reading the dreams together, the boy tells him they need to separate again and that the narrator should leave the city. The book ends shortly thereafter.
In typical Murakami fashion, much of this happens in enigmatic fashion. How does one get transported to and from the city? Who knows? Is this character version the “real” one and that version the “shadow”? Yeeesss? Nooo? Maaaybe? What are the shadows? Or the town, with its clock with no hands and its unicorns and the shape-shifting wall that surrounds it? Is it, as one character posits, “the consciousness that creates you as a person”? Or “the land of shadows [that] think they’re real people”? Possibly, the narrator muses, the shadows are all real, creating a “composite reality” made up of “different choices intertwined.” The city has either always existed or was called into existence by the narrator and his young love and then “nourished by the power of your [the narrator’s] imagination.” Or it’s more individualized, so that “the basic structure is the same, yet the details have been changed so it’s a town made for” each person’s unique needs.
One can make an argument for all of these, and several characters overtly do so at various points throughout. But why stop with what the characters themselves propose? I could make an equally cogent claim that the city in its timelessness and lack of creativity or curiosity (no music, no art) represents the stagnant, shuffling half-life that is grief. That the shadows are not versions split off via different choices (a sort of quantum character) but incarnations of the multiple selves we all contain within us. That the shape-shifting wall around the town represent the ways in which we are closed off from one to another, either intentionally to protect ourselves (despite the barrenness of that existence) or simply due to the unplumbable mystery of the human heart. Or, it’s an expression of the timing of the book’s composition, because we were all facing a plague that had us holed up in our homes, or masking ourselves, or keeping a circle of distance between each other. And I’m sure a half-dozen other readers could come up with a half-dozen other theories. As I might myself were I to read it another four times. Does Murakami himself “know” what the city is? Given this is his third attempt at a story with the central conceit, I have my doubts.
Just as I doubt that it matters. Why would we try to pin any of this down to a single meaning? After all, this is a book that refuses to hew to a single linear timeline and whose narrative bifurcates again and again, so that we get two towns, two libraries, two ghosts, two asexual relationships, two disappearances, two woodstoves, two lost loves, the whole matter becoming ever more diffuse amongst a multiplicity of dreams, of character versions and echoes, of worlds, of reiterations and rephrasings of the same points. This is a book where the lines between reality and dream, reality and “non-reality” constantly blur:
The feeling of two things mixing together, as if part of a boundary had collapsed. […]
Reality around me was cracking ever so slightly […]
A strange feeling of slippage, as if I’d suddenly wandered into a different world. […]
A strange feeling, as if I’d strayed from present reality. […]
All of which, to no surprise, leaves characters to constantly wonder where they stand or question their own reality:
Sometimes I can’t tell which is which. […]
Which world should I belong to? I couldn’t decide. […]
Soon we won’t be able to tell what’s hypothetical and what’s real. […]
Was I the real me? … it was getting hard to distinguish the hypothetical from the real. […]
I no longer possessed a set standard with which to determine what was real. […]
I don’t have a sense that I’m living this life as myself, as the real me. […]
I was trying to judge which side I was really on, and on which side the real person, the real me, could be found. […]
How one responds to all this is going to depend on one’s preference for utter clarity or resolution. Some, I am sure, will find it maddeningly frustrating that Murakami refuses to offer up clear answers. And I’d certainly be lying if I said I closed the book feeling wholly sure of various aspects of this novel. But then, given who the author is and that the word “Uncertain” is right there in the title, I didn’t expect to. Despite that, or more precisely because of that, I still found the book compelling in how it unsettles, provokes, and stimulates. Does the multiplicity of potential meanings have an adverse effect on the novel’s sense of cohesion or purpose? Probably. Is it muddy? Sure. But even with those downsides, I prefer the way Murakami refuses to put his metaphors into an authorial straitjacket so that we have no choice but to view them in one way and only that way.
Take how he eschews the typical usage of these elements. How the shadows, for instance, are not a “dark” side of one’s consciousness. Or how the city, despite being the author’s goal and a place where he seems to find some peace for a while at least, is not painted as some sort of utopian refuge. The unicorns are not noble beasts, music and art are nonexistent, food or conversation are lacking. Many a time during a descriptive passage of the city I’d write, “but is this good?” One could argue when it comes to his metaphors and images that Murakami refuses to commit. But I contend that he commits to not committing, and in doing so he commits to possibilities, to contradictions, to playfulness, to, yes, uncertainty. And for all the fantastical elements of this novel, is there anything more realistic in a depiction of our reality than uncertainty?
If the lack of clarity will meet with mixed reactions, other elements will find more consensus, if not unanimous (when is it ever?) approval. The exploration of love lost—and its total, rippling impact—is moving and strong throughout, seen not just through the aimlessness of the main character following the disappearance of “you” but also through Mr. Koyasu, whose losses are great indeed. Hand in hand with loss goes isolation and loneliness, and that theme is if anything even more prevalent. Nearly every character of major import is lonely: the narrator, his young love, Mr. Koyasu, the woman in the coffee shop, Yellow Submarine Boy.
The narrator never fully recovers from the disappearance of you and the sudden, inexplicable love of his youth. Part of it is the loss itself, part of it the paralyzing impact of her sudden vanishing, a “constant fear … that even if I managed to unconditionally love someone, there would come a day … [they] would vanish, without explanation.” The immediate impact is withdrawal from the world, when he “had no interest in college … made no friends … read books alone.” Even later, when he comes out of his shell, starts to form friendships, and even finds a girlfriend, he says “inside I always held back a part of me, keeping a piece of my heart in reserve.” And thus “I wound up hurting my girlfriend, and that ended up hurting me. And I became all the more isolated and alone.”
Mr. Koyasu never fits in with his family, and then is isolated by twin tragedies, living “a quiet life shut away in his home.” Like the narrator, he eventually comes out of his reclusivity, “strolling around town, greeting and talking to people.” But even so, he takes care to change his dress, opting for a skirt and beret, to forestall the town’s matchmakers, having no interest in another close relationship. The cafe owner, like the narrator and Mr. Koyasu, also suffers a lost love, though in a more typical fashion, on her first appearance already two years removed from a divorce caused by her husband’s infidelity. This led her to “go far away … somewhere where no one knew me.” Unknowingly echoing the narrator’s paralyzing fear of abandonment, she tells him, “I felt like no matter what man I might meet … no matter how much I felt I loved him, the same thing might happen all over again.” Meanwhile, Yellow Submarine Boy’s father is allegedly “embarrassed by him,” while his mother “adores him but probably doesn’t really get him.” According to Mrs. Soeda, the chief librarian, “neither one of [them] truly understands him or even makes an attempt to do so.”
I can’t say Murakami says anything particularly original or profound about loneliness and grief. In fact, some of the lines can feel awkwardly banal, as when one notes that, “Loneliness is extremely hard.” But in the slow, character-by-character accretion of loneliness (even a cat is described as “lonely” at one point), in the many introspective statements when characters describe their awareness of their loneliness, or in the simple descriptions of their mundane solo lives, the novel gains a surprising emotional power, one that makes the tenuous connections they do form—the narrator to Mr. Koyasu, to the coffee shop woman, to Yellow Submarine Boy—even more affecting.
That said, the impact would have been even greater with more consistently strong characterization. While the narrator and Mr. Koyasu are well developed (Mr. Koyasu, despite getting less page time and being a ghost, actually feels the most alive of all the characters), other characters, particularly the women, fare less well. Yellow Submarine Boy comes across either as a bare sketch of traits (the more generous reading) or as an overly simplified stereotype (the less generous one), while the women serve more as idea containers or plot props than as fully dimensional characters. The two who are only mentioned in passing are Yellow Submarine Boy’s mother, who “hovers” over him, doesn’t understand him, and loves him “the way you love a pet cat”; and Mr. Koyasu’s wife, portrayed almost exclusively through her trauma. The women who make an active appearance aren’t much better. Mrs. Soeda is mostly, almost solely, a tool for exposition, explaining the backstory of both Mr. Koyasu and the Yellow Submarine Boy. We learn almost nothing about her as a person beyond that she is efficiently effective in her job, is married to a teacher, is childless, and naturally, being a librarian, wears glasses and keeps her hair in a bun. We also are told she has a slim figure, “lovely skin,” and has “healthy-looking calves,” the image of which “lingers” when she has left the room—details that hardly strengthen Murakami’s bona fides when it comes to crafting women characters.
When it comes to the two women who get some real dialogue beyond exposition, the narrator’s love at least has a bit of depth. There is an evocative description of her depression and alienation, but that’s the only aspect we truly see of her beyond her invention (if one can use that word) of the city. The cafe woman is also portrayed mostly through her sense of being a bit broken, partially by her past relationship and the ensuing fear of entering another relationship, and also by her inability to have sex, which predated her marriage and for which she apologizes to the narrator. We also get what I’d call an unfortunate and painfully overt metaphor, via her decision to wear, whenever she is not alone, a “special underwear … that wasn’t metal, but a little too hard to be called clothes. Resilient, but plenty strong enough to repel anyone,” and which makes her feel “at ease. Like I’m completely protected. Safeguarded.” All in all, the book would have been a richer experience had the women been presented with more depth and variety.
Other clunky bits, akin to the “special underwear,” mar the experience periodically. A discussion of Gabriel Garcia Marquez feels shoehorned in and awkwardly on point:
In his stories, the real and the unreal, the living and the dead are all mixed together … Like that’s an ordinary, everyday thing.
People often call that magical realism.
Similarly, the usual Murakami “notes” can pop in discordantly, as when the jazz references enter out of the blue. Or the whiskey. Every writer has their little tropes and tics, of course, but here, while some such as the cat references come in organically, others feel like we’re getting items checked off a list. It’s not that the writer puts them in that rankles, but that it sometimes feels as if the work wasn’t done to make them belong: There’s no sense they derive from a natural outgrowth of character or plot. Other jarring moments include a pair of references to Anne Frank that seem to trivialize that story and one reference for some reason to Scarlett O’Hara. Ultimately, while as noted the repetitions and reiterations do serve a thematic purpose, I’m not sure we needed all of them. The same I’d say goes for the mundane details of preparing the night’s dinner for instance. Cutting the book by 10 to 15 per cent probably would have been to its advantage.
I started out this review by saying I was of two minds on The City and Its Uncertain Walls. Let’s call them “Real Me” and “Shadow Me.” One of them (does it matter which?) had issues with the thin portrayal of the women characters, the sometimes awkward and clunky bits of exposition or introduction of Murakami’s pet references, the occasional too-on-the-nose metaphors, and the sometimes prosaic or naïve pronouncements that seem to be aiming for a profundity they don’t achieve. The other ate up the nonlinear structure, the use of echoes, the playful and stimulating multiplicity of possible meanings, the thematic focus on grief, love, loss, and loneliness, the way I was moved by how characters who had found themselves in an aimless, lifeless rut, waiting as if in suspended animation, finally found themselves able to take some hesitant steps forward. And I’ll almost always take being made to feel and think over craft annoyances. The City and Its Uncertain Walls is not a perfect work, it’s not Murakami’s best work, but I’m of one mind on its value: It is a work certainly worthy of reading—and even rereading as I’ve already found my second time around.