The City and Its Uncertain Walls

The conceit of this novel is that there exists a fantastical City complete with bridge, clocktower with a handless clock, unicorny beasts and an impermeable wall that seals it off from reality. Somehow, however, the hesitant, querulous Haruki Murakami first-person protagonist breaches that wall and takes up the position of Dream Reader in the City’s library. If this set-up sounds familiar, it’s because it is: Murakami first published a novella, The City, and Its Uncertain Walls (note the comma) in a Japanese literary magazine in 1980, when he was 31 and running his Tokyo jazz bar. The conceit then found its way into his novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), in which it provided one half of the setting – the end of the world.

Forty years after writing the initial novella, in the year 2020 at age 71, Murakami returned to the story: ‘For so long this work had felt like a small fish bone caught in my throat, something that bothered me.’ Throughout the Covid times he reworked the book, easing that fish bone out. The City is, in a way, the idea of fiction, and Murakami’s question is: how is it that we go to fictional places and (more weirdly) exist there?

It begins with a love story between two teenagers, the story of the City being one which they cook up together. The girl escapes into that fictional city, the only place in which, she says, she is real. From that point, alternate chapters present bifurcating versions of the first-person narrator who, in the odd-numbered chapters mourns her disappearance for decades, and in the even-numbered ones, in the City, tries to approach her. From this leaping-off point, we move deeper and deeper into Murakami territory, cosy and uncanny as ever.