Book Review: The City and its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

Title: The City and its Uncertain Walls
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: November 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593801970 

Synopsis:
We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life. Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.

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The City and Its Uncertain Walls is the latest Murakami translation to hit English shelves. Hitting a good number of the Murakami tropes–another glorious Chip Kidd cover, appearances of cats, mystical alternate realities, elements of the supernatural, awkward sexual explorations–this prolific author brings yet another deeply thought-provoking novel to the literary landscape, once again proving his uncanny ability to capture the human condition. Filled with poetic prose, unknowable dreamscapes, and challenging realities, this latest novel is as unique and contemplative as so many other of his works.

Following the narrator from his contemplations and movement between reality and the other world where the city with uncertain walls exists, the story moves nonlinearly through the two realities: the one following the narrator as he grapples with his place in his life as he moves from teenagehood through to middle age, and the other in the city with its uncertain walls where people have no shadows and time does not exist. I’ve loved every Murakami, though I struggled with this particular one. Not every book is going to be a winner, and for me, while this book has many of the interesting tropes readers look for in a Murakami, it often got in its own way with certain descriptive and stylistic choices.

This is the first Murakami novel that I’ve rated at only three stars, the reason being the level of repetition throughout this book that did inhibit the reading process and pull me out of the story regularly. The narrator repeats himself to the point of disruption, in what is likely a stream-of-conscious style, however it soured my reading experience, making it a tedious and time consuming process to peruse each page. While I loved the city Murakami paints, the beautiful dream library, and the unicorns that mysteriously live and die outside the city walls, I still could not bring myself to want to pick this book up after the first few chapters.

The story reaches its peak level of intrigue with the introduction of an eccentric teenage savant whom with the narrator finds a connection. A character who likely lives with autism, his ability to consume and retain literature at an uncanny rate, yet who does not (or cannot) communicate with most other human contacts in any tangible way, sets him up as the perfect character to bridge the current “reality” with that of the alternate reality within the uncertain walled city.

Overall, an entertaining read, but I was not in the frame of mind to really sink into this book. It had too many qualities that kept me from fully immersing myself in the story. It does seem to be widely well-received on Goodreads, so for those who are fans of Murakami, this is a great one to check off the list. For those new to Murakami, perhaps select a different text as your first experience.

Happy reading!