Murakami takes a romantic look at the walls between us
What keeps us tethered to reality? For the unnamed narrator in Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, that is always in question. The Japanese writer has made a career of bending reality, or our expectations of reality, and The City and Its Uncertain Walls goes further down that path, with a narrator who is literally divided between one world and another.
That nameless narrator is separated from a long-ago teen love, his life unalterably shifted when, upon his girlfriend’s suggestion, he agrees to enter a place of dreams, an unnamed Town encircled by a wall. That’s the only way they can truly be together, she tells him. There, he’s partially blinded and becomes a reader of dreams in the local library—dreams stacked up on endless shelves. The town is weird, of course: people don’t cast shadows, and there are unicorns romping in the surrounding fields.
Murakami explains in the Afterword that he began this manuscript way back in the beginning, before becoming a bestselling novelist. That result—Part 1—is more of a novella, setting our hero in motion. Murakami says he returned to the novella over four decades, gradually reworking it to carry the story forward.
There are standard Lynchian touches, like an elderly library owner who wears a beret and a skirt in a conservative little Japanese town; or a silent teen boy who visits the library daily wearing only Yellow Submarine parkas and can tell you the day on which you were born.
But the narrator, who returns to the world outside the Town and consciously tries to recreate his library environment on this side of reality, has a more immediate concern:
Unconsciously I gazed around me. Was I myself connected tightly to something here? Had I put down roots? I thought of the blueberry muffins. And the tone of Paul Desmond’s alto sax coming through the speakers in the coffee shop near the station. And the thin, lonely female cat, its tail straight up, cutting across the garden. Were these things holding my spirit here in this world, if even a little? Or were they simply trivial details, not worth mentioning?
For whatever reason, The City and Its Uncertain Walls reminds us a little of Severance, the Apple+ TV series in which people literally choose to separate their work lives from their home lives—“innies” and “outies,” each having no knowledge of the other’s behavior or consciousness. There, Mark, Helly, Dylan and Irving wander the halls of Lumon headquarters (seemingly doing little actual work) and search for clues, trying to figure out what’s going on in their outside lives. It’s a surreal premise that dovetails with Murakami at times.
Midway through The City and Its Uncertain Walls, we’ve stopped wondering why there are unicorns and shifting walls in the Town; we’re caught up in the narrator’s new mystery, never sure where his trail of clues is leading, but slowly being drawn in. It helps that Murakami weaves his tale in hypnotic, dreamlike prose that feels as calming and mesmerizing as the woodstove flame he keeps going, deep in the bowels of his snow-set “outie” library.
And there’s a romantic core to this novel that feels different from previous Murakami tales. Since Murakami burst onto Western readers’ consciousness with The Windup Bird Chronicles, he’s explored the idea that we’re separated from the unreal—the dream space, whatever you wish to call it—by a thin membrane, a flickering miasma that, when merely touched, ripples outward, exposing glimpses of other realities. Maybe it’s only what we choose to believe that keeps us tethered. As the author himself put it in 2010:
We are living in a fake world. We are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So, our stories are the same; we are walking through the fake scene, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in that it’s a commitment.
Maybe, the author has suggested, it’s accelerating global capitalism that has caused our sense of disconnection, leading us to a place where we “mix and match” our separate views of reality, like a curated boutique containing our own beliefs. Of course, those early futurist musings had yet to face more sinister developments: technology engineering our pipelines of information, AI and algorithms reshaping facts into new simulacra, and political leaders nudging us towards universal acceptance of their version of reality.
It’s a relief, then, that City and Its Uncertain Walls works simply on the level of storytelling, exploring the romanticism between shifting realities without dropping us into the void. Setting it in a cozy, snowbound library is a nice touch. Book and author references abound—Gabriel Marquez, Hemingway—like Murakami is plucking them off a library shelf. How much awful reality do we need knocking on the walls of our consciousness when reading his novels, anyway?
Murakami, for his part, still dwells in a humanist landscape of fictional worlds, stories crafted and told on paper, where unicorns can roam inside shifting town walls (even if they often die of starvation in winter), and the choices of how to live still rest with us alone.
