"The City And Its Uncertain Walls" is a novel by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, published in 2023 in Japanese and in English translation in 2024. The book has an unusual history, as explained in its afterword: it was originally a novella published in 1980, before Murakami was a well-known writer. He then took aspects of the short story and rewrote it into Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. So this book reads in places like a "remix" of that novel.
So what to say about this book? In my review of Inland Empire, I said it might be the David Lynch movie, and I feel that "The City And Its Uncertain Walls" might be the Haruki Murakami novel. Our protagonist, an unnamed man, remembers an adolescent romance that led to him living in a town without time, where his shadow was removed from him and he works as a "dream reader" in a library of dreams. The town is protected by a "Gatekeeper" that doesn't let anyone in or out, except for a herd of unicorns that starve in winter. Fleeing the town, the man returns to present day Japan, where he gets a job in a rural library where the former librarian is a ghost that offers him both practical advice on running the library and is somehow aware of his time in the mysterious town, and where our unnamed protagonist also enters a polite romance with a local coffee shop owner where he prepares pasta while listening to jazz. Also, there is an autistic boy who wears a Yellow Submarine themed parka that might have a key to the entire mystery.
Almost all the plot points, and the timbre of the book, will be familiar to Murakami readers. Polite, cultured middle class life meets loss and devastation meets magical realism. And in case you aren't clear about what magical realism is, the protagonist and his coffee shop girlfriend discuss the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I will keep reading anything that Murakami writes, because the rhythm of his stories just seems so real---and as a person stuck at the edges of normal, middle class life, sitting in a basement with an earache, some parts of this book seem more real than they should. But much as I said with Killing Commendatore, I do wonder if we will ever see the disparate themes and images that Murakami uses drawn together. In the afterword, he says as much, saying that writers are limited to a certain amount of motifs, that they then rewrite in various ways. Murakami also comments that this book was written during pandemic era quarantines, and that played a role in how the story developed. The past ten years have been tumultuous years, and I wonder what these stories can tell us about the world we live in. But of course, that might not be what Murakami is aiming for.