9 hours Ago By Rahul Singh
Six years after the publication of his last work, Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami is back with his new novel titled The City and its Uncertain Walls. It is translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. The novel is inspired by a short story that Murakami had written at the start of his writing career back in 1980.
Divided into three parts, the first part of the novel is written in an elegiac form to his lover, whose mysterious disappearance has scattered him. He recalls the imaginary town they had constructed together and finds himself in search of her there. But the search has engulfed him so deeply that he is divested from the duties of his life in the real world.
The imaginary town, the library, the gatekeeper, the presence of a girl, and beasts haunting the town will take readers back to Murakami’s 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. In the foreword, the author admits that he wrote his 1985 novel as ‘a response’ to his 1980 short story, where the world is divided in two and parallel narratives play throughout the novel. Nonetheless, he was compelled to write a novel only about a man in a seamless narrative when the global pandemic began in 2020.
Both work as excellent companions of a universe that straddles the mysteries of science, consciousness, conscience, and the unconscious. One of the strong points of any Murakami novel is how its world is constructed. Be it the sombre, indulgent world of Toru Watanabe in Norwegian Wood, where he goes to distant places, drinks beer at the same bar, and watches the rain from his cramped apartment, or K’s experience of Greece in Sputnik Sweetheart, Murakami captures his readers with his stunning images and material elements of the world.
Here, the readers experience a similar escape into the world of Murakami, which is cold with winter, warmed by the presence of hot tea, black coffee, steaming blueberry muffins, moving walls, submissive unicorns, and an old library that a ghost frequents. The author makes every scene tell a story through his world-building. “The beasts in autumn squatted down here and there, their golden fur glistening in the evening sun, silently and awaiting the echoes of the trumpet to be absorbed into the air.
” Right from the start, the constant revocation of the memory of the young girl by her ‘lithe young body’, ‘big breasts...
swing back and forth when you ran’ can remind readers of the problem with Murakami and the sheer objectification of his female characters. Add to that, his female characters serve as mere plot devices for the men to really gain centre stage. The lover of the narrator is absent from the second part of the novel.
We never see her beyond the narrator’s need for sexual gratification or his need for self-affirmation. The same goes with the owner of a coffee shop he meets, whom he imagines to be in his bed. She is gone once she’s served a purpose for the narrator.
The absence of a woman’s authentic existence in Murakami’s world makes the novel phallocentric and one that works on the dictates of male ego, fantasies, and grief. While this grief in itself is not an issue, the manner in which it is played out at the cost of the women’s grief and alienation makes the reader pine for a more wholesome narrative. Finishing the book was exhausting.
The novel is too big, with too many repetitions that add little to the plot. More than proving a convincing story, it makes the reader want to skim rather than engage in understanding his loneliness, stagnation, and aloofness, of which we had been aware for 200 or so pages already. Murakami alludes to various writers like Marquez and Proust.
But the question remains: is the novel posturing itself to convince its readers of its greatness? The answer is no. The novel falls flat by constant blurring of boundaries, which Marquez considers nonexistent in his works. Similarly, the Proustian self-indulgence goes haywire here because, unlike the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, we don’t see Murakami’s narrator come to the reader in full force.
With Murakami, an intelligent reader eventually reaches a point when they are able to see through his plots, his predictable characters, and the necessity to imagine a depth to change one. When the ghost tells the narrator, ‘What I can say is one more thing—never give up believing. If you can believe strongly, deeply, in something, the road ahead will become clear’, one wonders if this is what Murakami asks his reader of him and his books.
If not for the belief in the greatness of his depth, would his novel work anymore?.
