Murakami, Haruki. The City and Its Uncertain Walls. English translation Knopf New York 2024.

I’ve been a fan of Murakami for many years and read and reviewed Blind Willow Sleeping Woman, Men Without Women, 1Q84, and Norwegian Wood. I liked them all but especially Blind Willow which is a short story collection. Prominent in all of them is a charming demotic translation into English, and a tendency for a quiet self-critical narrator to experience and think deeply about magical or imaginary situations. A lot of critics have said of The City that Murakami who is now in his 70s is just saying the same thing over again, and certainly all sorts of his trademarks are present. I liked it but partly agree with what the critics are saying.

(Plot alerts sprinkled here) Narrator has a girlfriend in high school who disappears into what amounts to an imaginary town. He follows her there but their relationship becomes vaguely distant and is never sexy or even romantic. He escapes back into the conventional (the real?) world and finds a job as a library manager in an isolated town. There he meets another potential girlfriend, who is afraid of sex. He also runs into a couple of males who are, in one case, literally a ghost and in another a young idiot savant who ends up much happier once he finds his way to the imaginary town which seems to exist for more than our narrator and his girlfriend.

The ghost is the former manager and originator of the library who has died of a heart attack and now appears only to the narrator and a lady employee. This somehow credible spirit creature then passes from that level of presence into a deeper kind of death in which he is completely inaccessible. We feel his second apparently permanent disappearance as important. He was a charming, wise, deeply reassuring presence. The socially awkward boy disappears physically from the (“real”) town and apparently chooses the reality of the “imaginary” town and its life.

(No more plot alerts) As usual with this author I find the narrator hard not to like. Unassuming would be a sharp understatement, he seems to struggle with the obvious two realities and what they really are, what they really mean, but in signature Murakami fashion in obsessing about something ethereal and knowing it is centrally important he keeps admitting he “doesn’t have a clue” about what’s actually going on. But his personal credibility and concern about the powerful nature of imaginary worlds should seem metaphorically accurate to anyone with a lively imagination:

… the town might be full of made-up stories, the origins of the town itself rife with contradictions. Since this was nothing but an imaginary town (he and his girlfriend) had dreamed up over the course of a summer. Nevertheless, the town might actually be able to snatch away a person’s life, since it was already out of our hands and had grown on its own. Once it was set in motion, I couldn’t control that power or alter it. Nobody could.

The main metaphor for me packs dramatic impact being not just obvious but taken seriously potentially inescapable. There are even in the way objects of the imagination cross over into our allegedly objective material world shades of JL Borges, although the two authors are completely different.

If you are a Murakami fan you probably will read this book but set against my experience of his other work I’d say if you haven’t read him and want to see him at his best try Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman instead.

8.4/8.4