The City and Its Uncertain Walls: A Novel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A REAL SIMPLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.
"Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction." —The New York Times • "More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world." —San Francisco Chronicle • "Murakami is masterful." —Los Angeles Times
When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he is heartbroken – and determined to find the imaginary town where he suspects she has taken up residence. Thus begins a lifelong search that takes the man into middle age, to a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own, and on a journey between the real world and this otherworld: a shadowless city where unicorns roam and willow trees grow.
There he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together and, as the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he must decide what he is willing to lose.
A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times– and singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.
"Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement. Isn't this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?” —Haruki Murakami, from the afterword
"Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction." —The New York Times • "More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world." —San Francisco Chronicle • "Murakami is masterful." —Los Angeles Times
When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he is heartbroken – and determined to find the imaginary town where he suspects she has taken up residence. Thus begins a lifelong search that takes the man into middle age, to a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own, and on a journey between the real world and this otherworld: a shadowless city where unicorns roam and willow trees grow.
There he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together and, as the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he must decide what he is willing to lose.
A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times– and singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.
"Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement. Isn't this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?” —Haruki Murakami, from the afterword
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Community Reviews
This book is classic Murakami from the first paragraph. However, in the end I’m not really sure what I read. This massive tome of a book is a meandering Magical Realism journey in Murakami style. Even Murakami wrestled with how to contain this story as he explains in the afterwards. While I did not hate it, I do find it hard to square its complexity and nuances into anything cohesive.
At best this is a coming of age drama that is expansive in scope, imagination, and themes. At other times it felt like escapism rooted in a disdain for the blandness of reality. With dreams and fantasy being the means for removing yourself from what’s in front of you. The philosophical aspects of dreaming and where the dreamscape you started and ended was the most interesting part for me.
At times the dream sequences reminded me of layer three of the dream as represented in the movie Inception. Mal and Dom build a city scape all their own but bereft of life. The lie of escapism. The mind becomes a city in its own that you can’t escape from. There was one jaw dropping moment that comes nearly at the very end but didn’t really move the story along to a meaningful conclusion.
“I found myself, before I realized it, back in that walled-in town. A world where unicorns roamed down the street, their hooves clicking on the stone pavement; where old, dust-covered dreams were lined up on the shelves; where the thin branches of the river willows swayed in the wind and a clock tower without hands overlooked a plaza. Of course, it was my heart only that had transitioned there. Or my consciousness. My actual physical body always remained in this world–probably.”
“What is real, and what is not? In this world is there really something like a wall separating reality from the unreal?...it's an entirely uncertain wall. Depending on circumstances and the person, its texture, its shape transforms. Like some living being.”
"I think the wall surrounding the town is the consciousness that creates you as a person. Which is why the wall can freely change shape apart from any personal intentions. A person's consciousness is the same as a glacier, with only a fraction of it showing above the water. Most of it is hidden, unseen, sunk in a dark place."
"What I'm getting at is in the realm of metaphor. The town behind a wall most definitely does exist. What I want to say is that there isn't a set route to get there. The path to get there differs from person to person. So if you decided to go ahead, you wouldn't be able to take him by the hand and lead him there. He has to discover, through his own power, his own personal route…he'll survive in the world that's best for him. And you need to live the life you chose, in the world you chose to be in.”
"In his stories the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, are all mixed together in one…Like that's an entirely ordinary, everyday thing…although that way of telling stories might fit the critical criteria of magical realism,” for Haruki Murakami, “ it's just ordinary realism. In the world he inhabits the real and the unreal coexist and he just describes those scenes the way he sees them…in the world he inhabits, the real and the unreal are equivalent.” Haruki Murakami “is simply recording that…And that's what I like about his novels."
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