1 week Ago By Anna Bonet
Isolation and alienation in the modern world have long been themes of the Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s fiction. So it is not surprising that Murakami, who has millions of readers globally thanks to books such as Norwegian Wood (1987) and The Wind -Up Bird Chronicle (1997), wrote his first novel in six years during the pandemic. Social distancing and hours to ruminate on one’s past and passions were predictably fertile ground for Murakami, 75.
It led him to rework a novella which he published in a magazine in 1980 and which now, in a much-expanded version, forms the basis for The City and Its Uncertain Walls . At 450-pages, it is an enveloping, magical realist story about an unnamed man who moves between contemporary Japan and an otherworldly city that is surrounded by a high wall. Now approaching middle-age, he is searching for his former girlfriend, his first love, who he met when he was 16.
“One day she vanished, without a word of farewell, without even a hint that she was leaving,” he recalls. “And I’ve never seen her since.” The novel is divided into three parts, the first of which takes place in the walled city, where the narrator moves through a closed-off society, encountering a gatekeeper, people whose bodies cast no shadows, unicorns with “lustrous yellow fur” and a library of dreams which stores images and stories that once swirled around individuals’ minds as they slept.
“It seemed as though, in the past, many more people had lived in this town,” he says. “And lived ordinary lives here. Yet at a certain point something had happened, and most of the residents had abandoned the town.
..” If the novel’s first hundred pages are perplexing and somewhat tedious – Murakami throws his reader into this fantasy world without doing enough to make us interested in it – part two is clearer and more compelling.
It begins after the narrator’s shadow has jumped into a vortex-like pool and he has woken up back in Tokyo . He gets a job in a library in a remote town where, it is no spoiler to say, thing are not as they at first seem. He wonders about his boss Mr Koyasu: “This old man, always decked out in a skirt, wearing a wristwatch without hands – what did this enigmatic person signify?” Read Next We All Shine On is a portrait of John Lennon as a self-indulgent manchild Meanwhile, a boy who does not go to school and always wears a Yellow Submarine T-shirt (it would not be a Murakami novel without a Beatles reference) haunts the narrator, reading in the library and hiding behind gravestones in the cemetery.
He reappears in the story’s third part, which takes place back in the walled city. Most of Murakami’s novel is immersive and, by the end, I eagerly turned its pages in the hope of discovering its mysteries. But I could not help noticing some slack prose: a room is “musty with a smell from a forgotten age” while elsewhere the narrator “felt a sort of enigmatic, suggestive feeling in the air.
As if, long ago, a person had whispered some vital secret here to someone.” This imagery is supposed to be atmospheric and portentous, but it comes off vague and lazy. The novel also purports to be channelling the strange and unfamiliar and yet many of its elements – the mournful male narrator, slacker ennui and one-dimensional women characters – feel overly familiar from Murakami’s earlier books.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls did make me contemplate the borders between dreams and the everyday, the living and the dead, fiction and reality, but only to a degree that was obvious and rudimentary. It treats loss and loneliness with such a dearth of complexity and nuance that it read to me as a children’s book marketed at adults. For writer who is regarded as a Nobel Prize contender, this has to be a little disappointing.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel, is published by Harvill Secker on 19th November, £25.
