The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2024)

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It won’t take long, maybe a few pages, before ardent Haruki Murakami fans experience a sense of deja vu reading The City and Its Uncertain Walls, as if they’ve visited this place before. Which should be expected as his latest novel reworks not just 1985’s ‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’, but also ‘The Town and Its Uncertain Wall’, a 1980 novella that remains untranslated from the original Japanese (and likely will, given Murakami’s dissatisfaction with it).

Maybe rework isn’t the best description, though it’s more apt than rewriting, though Murakami himself prefers the term ‘complete’ instead. And completing this story seems to have excised a few literary demons for Murakami, a regret he likened to “a small fishbone caught in my throat” now fully dislodged with this newer adaptation (translated by Philip Gabriel). He wasn’t alone in this quest to revisit the original work; the novel it’s based on has also been freshly retranslated (and retitled: End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland) by Jay Rubin, meaning there’s yet another version of this story to explore again.

Even the best synopsis for The City and its Uncertain Walls might come across dry, like reading the lyrics to a beloved Beatles song without hearing the melody. Murakami wouldn’t like that, so here’s an attempt anyway: Our protagonist, an unnamed 17-year-old boy, becomes smitten with a 17-year-old girl. The two form a connection in their teens that will last a lifetime, though not equally. She tells him of a mysterious town surrounded by a giant wall, where clock towers have no hands and time itself is unmoored from reality.

Apart from people, the only other living creatures were the unicorns that wandered in the woods nearby. Oh, and none of the people had shadows. To enter this place one must give up their shadow, to have it literally separated from oneself. Here, the young boy is fully grown, and works as a Dream Reader in the town’s library, deciphering dreams collected on the shelves. “The real me lives there,” she tells him, explaining this version of herself is only a wandering shadow. But then the girl disappears. Despondent, the boy nevertheless trudges on with his life, pursuing a mundane career in book distribution until an irresistible force causes him to reevaluate everything he’s ever believed in.

As with Hard-Boiled Wonderland (and very Murakami) the narrative alternates between parallel paths whose seemingly disparate fibers only begin connecting as the story unfolds. Well, mostly start connecting, anyway. Told in three parts, our protagonist will venture into ideas of time and spaces as only Murakami could describe, stretching concepts of ‘magical realism’ as he begins to upend his very existence to explore a world where ghostly specters are “consciousness with a temporary body” and children are ‘spirited away’ in the middle of the night.

Along the way we’re introduced to the usual cadre of characters that can only be described as Murakami-esque, like the shy autistic boy wearing a parka with a picture of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine who also happens to be a voracious reader with unparalleled retention. And what of the mysterious Mr. Koyasu, the kindly head librarian who welcomes our protagonist to the small town as his successor, with a penchant for wearing his trademark navy-blue beret with a wraparound skirt?

It takes a little longer for The City and Its Uncertain Walls to go full Murakami (fans will know what I mean), but once it does the novel settles into a rhythm that’s comfortably familiar yet still opaque. Nearly every familiar Murakami-ism is present (jazz, The Beatles, cats, cooking, reading, young love, sex, etc.), which is a treat and yet still disappointing as there’s little suspense to the resolution we know is coming, if only because it’s been telegraphed decades in advance.

Instead is a revisitation of themes and ideas we’ve seen before (albeit phantastical ones largely originated by Murakami), almost as if he’s attempting to bridge the liminal space of four decades separating a younger writer from his older self. To be fair, authors often lapse into cycles of predictability at some point in their work, especially those with large oeuvres (if they’re lucky). This can be passed off as “style”, even welcomed nostalgia, letting us scratch a very particular itch.

Murakami is no different, but I wonder if the expectations put upon an author famous for upending conventions may be working against those attempting an objective analysis of a book where the theme of repetition appears deliberate.

I suspect the scuttlebutt around the history, writing, and rewriting of The City and Its Uncertain Walls will likely supersede the actual book itself, which feels appropriate for an author refining a story he’d dreamed up decades prior, reworking the machinations of one of his most popular novels to quiet any lingering doubts. Few authors could invoke such meta-commentary not just on their own work, but through it as well, letting both Murakami and readers symbiotically experience this journey together. Perhaps all over again, perhaps for the first time. What outsiders might think of this, I’m not sure.