Book Review: "The City and Its Uncertain Walls" by Haruki Murakami

The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2024)
Haruki Murakami (1949)
449 pages

In Haruki Murakami’s novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls, a young couple enjoy each other’s company while strolling through parks or sitting in cafes. They live in separate cities, an hour and a half train ride apart, and so cherish these times they can be together.

As their relationship deepens, the girl begins describing a town where, she says, her real self lives.  "The me here with you now isn’t the real me. It’s only a stand-in. Like a wandering shadow." (4)  Over time, she fills in ever more detail about the town, and life in it, including that a place and occupation exist for him there, too. The boy, though he struggles to understand the true nature of the place she describes or his beloved’s role there, recognizes and accepts its reality to her.

When the girl one day disappears from his life without a trace, he descends into a profound melancholy. Though he moves on – completing school, taking up a career, and occasionally dating along the way – he never forgets the girl. He continues to carry with him her answer to his question about how one enters her mysterious town, the strange place where her real self supposedly lives:

You just need to wish your way in. But truly wishing for something, from the heart, isn’t that simple. It might take time. (5)

Murakami represents the two worlds, the one the couple originally occupy – what we would consider the real world – and the other with the mysterious town the girl describes, as kinds of alternate realities. As the boy becomes a man, he begins to have experiences that shift between these realities, all the while attempting to find his place in them and to understand his relationship with the girl he still loves.

The story fits into the genre of magical realism; Murakami even references it, with two of the characters discussing Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. It’s a genre I’ll admit that I’ve never been particularly drawn to, although I’ve read and enjoyed several of García Márquez and Isabel Allende, as well as an earlier Murakami novel, After Dark, which has elements of magical realism that give it the feeling of a series of impressionist overlays of reality, as I discuss in my review (linked to at right).

While I found The City and Its Uncertain Walls engaging, the open-endedness of the alternative realities he presents left me unsatisfied. No doubt just a measure of my own personal taste with this particular story, for it’s not that uncertainties in stories always bother me. Just as one example, I found Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall (my review linked to at right) a gripping, moving read, despite having both the origin of the eponymous wall and the ultimate fate of the main character left unknown.

In Murakami’s novel, however, while the enigmatic town does seem to exist in some strange, unfathomable and unexplained way, we are left unclear if the boy’s engagement with it is a dream, a hallucination, or something more. Perhaps, in the end, it doesn’t matter – it’s simply meant to be a part of the mystery of love, left to each reader to interpret.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf