Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami

Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami

by Rich Horton

Haruki Murakami is one of the most celebrated contempory Japanese writers, and a large portion of his work is SF or Fantasy or just weird. As such I have been meaning to read him for a long time, but only now have I got around to it. I will note that The City and Its Uncertain Walls may not be the best place to start with him -- or, rather, my reaction to it may be different that that of readers who have read a lot of his work. One reason is that the book reworks some material first published as a novella with which Murakami was unsatisfied, and then revised to form one thread of his 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I am also told that the protagonist is a somewhat typical Murakami male lead -- lonely, a love a books and music, and somewhat obsessive in his love affairs. Indeed, one book club friend of mine immediately asked if the book features a nerdy solitary man (almost an incel, she suggested, though not really) who at one point falls into a deep hole. And, yes, this novel does!

Outlining the plot of this novel really tells one very little about how it works. So I'll be brief. A nameless narrator tells the story in three parts. The first is written in second person, addressing the girl he fell in love with as a teenage. When he was 17 and she 16, they spent a lot of time together, walking and talking, occasionally kissing, writing long letters to each other, but nothing more. Much of what they talked and wrote about was a strange walled city. The people in the city have no shadows. The girl seems to believe that she is actually the shadow of a girl who lives in the city. Over time it seems that the city is actually an invention of the two -- but an invention that is oddly real. The two are desperatly in love -- then the girl disappears -- or, at least, becomes completely unresponsive to the boy's letters. He goes to college, gets his degree, has brief relationsship with other women, but never forgets the girl. Then, in his mid-40s, he finds himself mysteriously transported to a city -- a walled city. He gains entry at the cost of his shadow, and gets a job as a dream reader at the library -- and the librarian is the girl he had loved as a teenager, still seeming only 16 or so. Over some time he learns to read dreams, and becomes friends with the girl (in a nonsexual way -- and she does not recognize him at all) -- but when he realizes his shadow -- forced to remain outside the city -- is dying, he faces a choice: reunite with his shadow so that it can survive, and then return to the "real" world, or stay in the city.

The next and longest part follows the narrator's life back in the real world. He remembers his time in the city, but not really how it ended. No time sseems to have passed in the "real" world while he was in the city. He has become dicontented with his rather mundane job, and he has enough money (having lived a somewhat spare single life since college) that he can take some time off, and, inspired by some strange dreams, he decides to look for a job in a library. He finds one in a mountain village some distance from Tokyo, and somewhat to his surprise, is hired as head librarian. The situation there is a bit strnage, especially the previous head librarian, who continues to give him advice. But the narrator adjusts, and eventrually forms a tentative relationship with a woman, and then gets involved with a teenaged boy who seems to be on the spectrum, and comes to the library to obsessively read, and eventually tells the narrator that he wants to escape to the walled city -- somehow he learned of the city despite the narrator telling no one but the mysterious former head librarian. Which leads to the events of the third part -- which I'll leave untold.

All this is indeed mysterious, but by itself perhaps thin gruel for a 500 page novel. (And in all honesty the middle part could probably have been cut a bit.) But for me it really worked. The novel casts a real spell. The narrator’s teenage love affair is affecting. The city itself is convincingly strange, with unicorns, clocks without hands, the everchanging walls, the gatekeeper, the old dreams the narrator reads. The mountain town he moves to seems in its isolation to somewhat mirror the otherworldly city. The narrator’s adult relationship with a woman who owns a coffee shop is affecting as well, and more mature than the narrator’s earlier affair. His friendship with his predecessor, Mr. Koyasu, is amusing and involving and at another level, rather sad. Most of all, there is everywhere an air of mystery. There is also a sense of emptiness, and a concomitant loneliness. There are really very few characters of any significance, and one senses that all the characters that matter to us – the narrator, his teenaged girlfriend, Mr. Koyasu, the perhaps autistic boy he meets late in the book, the woman in the coffee shop – are ultimately very lonely, very isolated, and so the importance of the connections we do see them form is enhanced.

As for the prose -- I am of two minds about it. Murakami has an exceptional may with striking and original images. And I was not ever bored, despite his habit of almost obsessive description of mundane things like clothes, and with his almost pedantic rendering of dialogue. All this, in the end, really works. But I did have trouble with some aspects of the writing, that just possibly lie more at the feet of the translator. Occasional phrases in English are outright clichés, and I don’t know if these are direct translations from the original or an example of the translator using an English cliché in place of a perhaps less trite Japanese expression. Some of the phrasing is stilted in a way that suggests possibly a too literal rendering of the structure of the sentences in the Japanese, when a slight reformulation would have read more smoothly. And there are curiously annoying bit such as rendering dimensions in English units in a slightly unnatural way -- something is described as "about 6 and a half feet tall" when the original probably read "two meters", for example, or a square room is described as about 13 feet by 13 when, again, the original likely said 4 meters on a side.

The above quibbles are minor, though. I was enchanted by the novel, at times transported. There are passages of unexpected beauty, of pathos, and of deep mystery. Perhaps  it is not a great novel, but it's a very good one.