‘The City and Its Uncertain Walls’ Review: Murakami’s Time Machine

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The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami returns to a world he first imagined as a young writer, in a new story of dreams and loss.

Boyd Tonkin

Nov. 15, 2024 10:38 am ET

‘Houses Along a Road’ (ca. 1881) by Paul Cézanne. Photo: Bridgeman Images

In April 1978, the debt-laden young proprietor of a Tokyo jazz cafe went to a baseball game: Yakult Swallows against Hiroshima Carp. There, in Jingu Stadium, he decided he could write a novel. The birth of Haruki Murakami’s career as a beloved giant of global fiction sounds as improbable as any outlandish event in his books. Over 15 novels, and a half-dozen story collections, the Japanese literary superstar has hopped back and forth across the line between inner and outer worlds. His international bestsellers, such as “Norwegian Wood” (1987) and “Kafka on the Shore” (2002), addictively juggle fantasy and realism, the magical and the mundane. That stadium epiphany saw him shift from one world to another. A mysterious switch flipped; everyday reality yielded to the realm of imagination.

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The City and Its Uncertain Walls

By Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel

Knopf

464 pages

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Published last year in Japan, and translated by Mr. Murakami’s regular collaborator Philip Gabriel, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” bears witness to his enduring vision of a world in which “the real and the unreal coexist” on equal terms. It shows, too, how his style and method have evolved. The book began, his afterword explains, as a novella published in 1980 in a Tokyo literary magazine, at a time when Mr. Murakami still ran his “Peter Cat” jazz joint. Its tale of a lonely misfit teenager—one of many in the author’s body of work—who strays into the storybook-walled town of his dreams would later feed one strand of his 1985 breakthrough novel, “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” In this new work, fans of that book will find themselves back in the “eternal present” of that timeless town.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr. Murakami revisited the 1980 novella. In that “weird and tension-inducing situation,” he explains, he expanded a narrative around the dream-enclave of his early story. This more realistic—though still uncanny—frame makes up the bulk of the new novel. So the apprentice and the master Murakami, age 31 and 71 respectively, now meet in these pages: a rendezvous as spooky as any in his plots.

Here the unnamed 17-year-old narrator falls chastely in love with a girl one year his junior. Angelic but fragile, cast from the limited mold of Mr. Murakami’s early heroines, she tells him of the lovely but static town where she dwells in her imagination. In Murakami-land, dreams—which the heroine imagines as a “crucial water source nurturing your heart”—may become truth. The narrator travels to the town, depicted like some illustration from a medieval manuscript or the bejeweled backdrop to an anime film from Japan’s Studio Ghibli. Unicorns graze outside impenetrable walls guarded by a gruff Gatekeeper. A willow-shaded river winds among tumbledown buildings. New arrivals must check in their shadows at the gate. Supervised by his beloved, or an imaginary avatar of her, the narrator works in a bookless library as a “Dream Reader,” absorbing the stored “joy, sadness, or anger” of strangers.

The walled town is both idyll and jail. As in “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,” Mr. Murakami presents the romantic fantasies of youth as not only glorious but also oppressive. Threadbare citizens live confined existences without curiosity or change: The clocks in this “theme park” of adolescent bliss have no hands. At one point, the narrator encounters a magic pool that serves as an “interstice between this world and the other world.” The novelist loves picturesque portals between dimensions of reality; here the pool permits the narrator’s separated, and rebellious, shadow to escape.

Back in a more familiar domain, the angelic girl has vanished without trace. The narrator, like many of this author’s protagonists, trudges into a humdrum, solitary middle age. Romantic obsession means that “time had actually come to a halt” for him. At least, by toiling for a book-distribution firm, he keeps in touch with the kingdom of imagination. In his mid-40s he quits this role as a “tiny, fixed cog” in Tokyo’s corporate machine to work as a low-paid librarian in the mountainous backwoods of Fukushima prefecture.

This eerie landscape of snows, forests and torrents is beautifully evoked as Mr. Murakami the seasoned storyteller of loss, loneliness and passing time takes charge. The action dawdles, then leaps, with a trademark blend of soap opera and sublimity. In deadpan, slow-burn, quietly hypnotic prose, delicately conveyed in Mr. Gabriel’s translation, our narrator settles into a becalmed life as guardian of the small-town library stacks. But in a Murakami novel, normality won’t persist for long. Fragments from the dream-town (a blue beret, a wood-burning stove) turn up in this library, funded by the eccentric, enigmatic widower Mr. Koyasu. The narrator senses that a “boundary had collapsed” and that “the tips of two different worlds were overlapping.”

As often with this author, a ghost enters the scene: friendly, regretful, eager to inform us that “the soul is a transitory state.” Even spirits soon fade away. Murakami mavens will want to know if cats (which often make their way into the author’s novels) feature. They do. As do nods to classic jazz: In this case, the sax legend Paul Desmond stars. Amid this signature decor, our lonely librarian meets a voracious teenage book-browser in a jacket adorned with a Beatles motif. “Yellow Submarine Boy,” an isolated, fast-reading kid, comes to share the narrator’s dreamscape. The boy longs to “transition to that other town.” Mr. Murakami understands these parallel territories of the mind not simply as escapism but as a precious refuge for those who “had never put down roots in this world.” He conjures the charm, and also the harm, of all-consuming obsessions. In the perfect walled town, no cats prowl, because “nothing unneeded” can exist there.

Yet as this often droll, occasionally dull, but oddly irresistible fable suggests, living in our ideal cities of fantasy may prohibit growth and change. And, via some awkward dates with a divorcée who runs a coffee shop, the narrator will begin a new chapter. Throughout this journey, borders between internal and external reality, the conscious mind and its dream-dwelling “shadow,” waver and blur. “Believe in the existence of your other self,” counsels the precociously wise Yellow Submarine Boy. As, no doubt, would Mr. Murakami—at every stage of his spellbinding career.

Mr. Tonkin is the author of “The 100 Best Novels in Translation.”

Appeared in the November 16, 2024, print edition as 'Dream Weaver'.