The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

“Once you’ve tasted pure, unadulterated love, it’s like a part of your heart’s been irradiated, burned out, in a sense. Particularly when that love, for whatever reason, is suddenly severed. For the person involved, that sort of love is both the supreme happiness and a curse.”

-The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is an author who has meant a great deal to me for the past sixteen years or so (wow that makes me feel old!). I discovered his novels when I was working at a Borders bookstore in college. The first book I bought of his was The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and that book set me diving into unique, strange stories full of wonderful characters, parallel realities, and stories that you can lose yourself in. I think after that I read Kafka on the Shore and I was blown away that any writer was writing anything this incredible and mesmerizing. After that I read a few of his books a year, falling further in love with titles like Norwegian Wood, After Dark, Wind/Pinball, The Elephant Vanishes and all the others. And then I got to the point where I had read everything he had written. Which is both a wonderful and sad feeling. So I did what any book lover would do, I started to re-read my favorites while I waited for his next book.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls was released a little over a year ago, and while I intended to jump right in, I ended up waiting on it a bit, and I am glad I did. I’m a firm believer that books are read precisely when they’re meant to be read. When they will have the most impact on your life. This novel is a masterpiece. It is enthralling, thought provoking, meandering (in a beautiful way) and so full of depth and emotion. I could spend years re-reading this and never truly uncover all the layers Murakami intended for the reader.

As with many of his novels, the narrator of this novel is unnamed. He is a man at different points of his life- alternating between his time as a teenager and middle age. When he was seventeen, he met a girl and fell in love in a way he never had before and never would again. The two would spend their afternoons together talking about a fictional town, surrounded by a wall that she was desperately trying to return to. But one day, the girl disappears and he never hears from her again. Wondering what might have happened to her, and if she might have found her way to this town, he lives life as best as he can.

Yet at some point in his life, he finds himself at the town too. He has found the girl again, but she is not the same and she has no memory of him. To enter this town, he must give up his shadow and live outside of time. But once you enter, you can’t leave unless you have your shadow. He takes a job in the library but instead of reading books, he reads dreams.

And then we see the same narrator at middle age, having abruptly quit his job, knowing that he must recapture the feeling he had of that town however he can. He takes a job in a small town in the moutains as the head librarian of a small private library and begins to remind himself how to live.

The three timelines interweave and overlap, and the reader journeys with the narrator, trying to puzzle through where he has been, where he has gone and where he will end up. This book is a reflection on memory, love, humanity and grief.

“Maybe I’ve lost sight of me. I don’t have a sense that I’m living this life as myself, as the real me. Sometimes I think I’m merely a shadow. When I feel that way, I get this restless feeling, like I’m simply tracing an outline of myself, cleverly pretending to be me.”

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

The first version of this story was written by Haruki Murakami in 1980 and published in a small magazine. He never was truly satisfied with the piece and never allowed it to be republished. He attempted to go at the questions he was trying to answer in this story in the book Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World but the story stuck with him. He started writing this novel 40 years after the first short story was published and it took him three years to complete. It is in my opinion a testament to how incredible of a writer he is. And I think it is so admirable he never quit on this idea, that he kept going and finally wrote the story he wanted to write, giving us readers the chance to experience this world and these characters.

Haruki Murakami is for me, one of the greatest writers that has ever lived. His stories have meant so much to me, and I will carry them with me forever. I hope to turn a few more readers into fans of his writing, so if you’ve been thinking of trying his books, now is the time.