Haruki Murakami’s “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” Review: A Masterpiece of His Career

For major-league novelists, late-career works can sometimes feel like a greatest hits compilation, a phenomenon that can work for and against them. Sometimes, they end up producing anaemic rehashes of their most successful works, regurgitating images and stories that have occupied them for decades. Don DeLillo’s books over the past five to six years are a good example. But on other occasions, a mature novelist serves up something that feels designed to distil the most important ideas of their career into one perfectly executed book (Saul Bellow’s last novel, Ravelstein, for instance). Haruki Murakami fans ought to rejoice, for that is exactly what has happened with the veteran Japanese writer’s latest, The City and its Uncertain Walls.

The novel unfolds across two parallel timelines. In the first, the 17-year-old unnamed male protagonist is in a relationship with a 16-year-old girl, whom he met at an essay-writing contest they both win. The somewhat distant girl tells her boyfriend that her “real self” exists in a city beyond the wall, working at a mysterious library. And then one day, she vanishes, never to be heard from again.

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In the second timeline, we follow the protagonist as a grown man who arrives in the city he and his girlfriend imagined as teenagers. He begins working in the library as a “dream reader”, with his frozen-in-time 16-year-old former girlfriend assisting him, insisting that she has no memories of their time together.

Flowing effortlessly

Long-time Murakami readers will readily identify the “greatest hits” patterns here. A sensitive, existential male protagonist looking for a long-lost love—purportedly to find her but really to mourn her properly and move on (Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle). A mysterious library at the heart of the novel’s mysticism and philosophy (The Strange Library). A special bond between the protagonist and his cat; the essay he wrote for the competition is about the family cat (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore have cats as prominent plot points).

But more importantly, Murakami’s sentences here are flowing as effortlessly as ever, artfully bringing out a chapter’s subtext bit by bit. During an early chapter, when we are just getting to know the teenagers-in-love a little better, we come across this exchange between the two that tells us something about the girl’s mysterious past and hints at why she is so guarded and perpetually in search of her “real self”.

“You said almost nothing about your own family. All I knew were a few small details. Your father had worked as a local public servant, but when you were eleven, through some misconduct on his part, he was forced to resign and now worked in the office of a private cram school. What this misconduct was all about, I had no idea, but it seemed like something you didn’t want to talk about.”

Murakami is also funnier here than I remember him being across his last four-five books—basically everything since the epic misfire that was 1Q84. Here, he is letting his hair down, indulging in short, straight-faced jokes like this one-liner: “The tall girl who won first prize gave a short speech.”

A short exchange between the lovers about their respective essays becomes a de facto referendum on Murakami’s own immediately recognisable style. The boy writes simple, rooted narratives filled with off-kilter observations about daydreaming. She, meanwhile, likes to describe her dreams in her writing. Of course, as Murakami readers know well, his novels are in a state of constant tension between these two “modes”.

“What’s stayed with me most were several dreams you described. You often had long, involved dreams, and could clearly recall the details, as if remembering actual events. I found this incredible. I hardly ever dreamed, and even when I did, the content eluded me, my dreams falling to pieces, scattering the moment I woke up. Even if a particularly vivid dream made me bolt awake in the middle of the night (not that this happened much), I’d fall asleep again right away and, come morning, couldn’t remember a thing.”

What does all of this mean? The dreams, the cats, the bifurcated writing modes? In my view, the one thing that unites all these motifs is the man whose work has been among Murakami’s biggest influences: Carl Jung.

Writing as self-therapy

Murakami has said, on more than one occasion, that he started writing as self-therapy. He had a difficult relationship with his father, a war veteran, and lost an ex-lover to death by suicide. You can see these dynamics playing out in many of his books, especially the “Trilogy of the Rat” (Dance Dance Dance, Pinball, 1973, and Hear the Wind Sing). Also, Murakami’s conversations with the Japanese Jungian psychologist Hayao Kawai were collected into a book in the late 2000s.

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Consider, for example, how Murakami uses the idea of the protagonist’s shadow in The City and its Uncertain Walls. Before entering the city of his and his girlfriend’s imagination, he is confronted by a doorkeeper who insists he leave his shadow behind. In Jungian psychology, the “shadow” is a term for the repressed self. The mystical realms in Murakami novels are therefore both the classical “underground” (Yomi-no-kuni, or land of the dead in Shinto mythology) and a kind of therapeutic space where one lets go of childhood scars—repressed emotions among them, of course. In Dance Dance Dance, the character Kiki explicitly refers to herself as the protagonist’s shadow, making the connection clear.

The City and its Uncertain Walls not only keeps its focus on individual trauma but also goes a step beyond, creating an allegory that applies to Japan and Japanese people as a whole. Murakami has used this method of depicting generational trauma previously too, especially in the short story “A Slow Boat to China” (from the collection The Elephant Vanishes). It is just that with this novel the method and Murakami’s work have reached an astonishing crescendo.

The City and its Uncertain Walls is the book Murakami had been building up towards all his life, and it lives up to the billing.

Aditya Mani Jha is a writer and journalist working on his first book of non-fiction.