Well, it had to happen eventually: I've found a work by Murakami that I kind of liked.

<i>The City and Its Uncertain Walls</i> has many beautiful descriptive passages and the odd friendship between the narrator and Mr. Koyasu was the best part of the book for me. On the negative side, I think the books is twice (probably thrice) as long as it should be and that Murakami cannot write convincing female characters.

I had a very difficult time following this story. I ended up DNFing at 30%. It was very hard to follow.

If it's taken almost a year and I'm still not more than 30% of the way through, I think I have to be honest with myself and DNF. Maybe my brain just isn't wired for the way Murakami writes anymore and all of the paths and curiosities he takes on.

Couldn’t really get into this one and wound up DNFing (which never happens to me). Since I didn’t complete the book I would give it a neutral rating. Thank you for the ARC! I am very sorry this one wasn’t for me.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls (3100 words)

Given the nature of Haruki Murakami’s newest work, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, it’s particularly apt that I’m of two minds with regards to the book. Possibly three minds, equally apropos considering the novel’s tri-part structure. Maybe even, no, let’s just stop at three.

While I labeled it Murakami’s newest work, a more accurate description might be newish, as large parts are a reworking of his earlier novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, itself a reshaping of an even earlier novella (Murakami runs through an explanation of all this in a brief afterword). I’ll leave parsing the specific similarities and differences among the three versions to some grad student’s future thesis. Suffice to say that Murakami hasn’t simply extended the earlier works, turning a long short story into a novel and then that novel into an even longer one simply by adding more plot. He’s working with the same subject, yes, but using a different palette, opting for a little less science fiction there, a little more melancholy there. So if you’ve read Hard-Boiled Wonderland, you’ll recognize its bones here, but it won’t feel like a lazy rehashing of the same story. On the flip side, not having read the prior novel won’t have any impact on your experience with this one; you’ll be equally befuddled either way.

As noted, the story is presented in three parts. The first opens with our unnamed narrator relating how he and the girl he addresses as “you” throughout this part fell in love as teens one summer. Early in their relationship, she tells him about a town “surrounded by a high wall so it’s very hard to enter … And going out is even harder.” There, she says, the “real” her lives, the person now with him merely a “stand-in. Like a wandering shadow”), and if he wants to meet the real her, he’ll have to get to the town. The good news-bad news is that he “has the qualifications” to enter and even become the town’s reader of old dreams in the same library she works at, but she unfortunately won’t know him, as the real her and he wouldn’t have met. Part One then alternates between two tracks. One details their mostly idyllic summer together up to the time the girl suddenly disappears, followed by a brisk recap of the subsequent lonely years until he turns forty-five. The other relates the narrator’s time in the walled town where he meets the girl once again, though she is still sixteen and he is now a grown man (as forewarned, she doesn’t recognize him). The section ends with the narrator choosing to stay in the walled town and let his shadow, which had to be severed from him to enable entry into town, return to the “real world.”

Part Two finds the narrator back in our world, though how and why is a mystery to him. Grieving his loss and feeling wholly unmoored — “I simply felt that this reality wasn’t suited to me” — he quits his work and takes a new job as director of a small library in a rural mountain town under the mentorship of Mr. Koyasu, the library’s founder, former director, and current ghost. Eventually, the narrator starts seeing a woman who runs the local coffee shop, and he also befriends an autistic teen referred to as the Yellow Submarine boy thanks to his favorite tee-shirt. When the boy overhears the narrator speaking of the town, he becomes determined to go there himself and take on the role of Dream Reader, while the narrator struggles with the ethics of helping him.

Part Three returns us to the town, where the narrator (or some version of him) has been working as the Dream Reader in the library where the girl of his youth works. He spots Yellow Submarine boy on the street (though he doesn’t know who he is, having not met him in this reality) and when they finally interact the boy tells the narrator the two have to “merge” into one being so the boy can become the Dream Reader. They do so, and after a brief time reading the dreams together, the boy tells him they need to separate again and that the narrator should leave the city. The book ends shortly thereafter.

In typical Murakami fashion, much of this happens in enigmatic fashion. How does one get transported to and from the city? Who knows? Is this character version the “real” one and that version the “shadow”? Yeeesss? Nooo? Maaaybe? What are the shadows? Or the town, with its clock with no hands and its unicorns and its shape-shifting wall that surrounds it? Is it, as one character posits, “the consciousness that creates you as a person”? Or “the land of shadows [that] think they’re real people”? Possibly, the narrator muses, the shadows are all real, creating a “composite reality” made up of “different choices intertwined.” The city has either always existed or was called into existence by the narrator and his young love and then “nourished by the power of your [the narrator’s] imagination.” Or it’s more individualized, so that “the basic structure is the same, yet the details have been changed so it’s a town made for” each person’s unique needs.

One can make an argument for all of these, and several characters overtly do so at various points throughout. But why stop with what the characters themselves propose? I could make an equally cogent claim that the city in its timelessness and lack of creativity (no music, no art) or curiosity represents the stagnant, shuffling half- life that is grief. That the shadows are not versions split off via different choices (a sort of quantum character) but incarnations of the multiple selves we all contain within us. That the shape-shifting wall around the town represent the ways in which we are closed of one to another, either intentionally to protect ourselves (despite the barrenness of that existence) or simply due to the unplumbable mystery of the human heart, our deepest thoughts. Or, given the timing of the book’s composition, because we were all facing a plague that had us holed up in our homes, or masking ourselves, or keeping a circle of distance between each other. And I’m sure a half-dozen other readers could come up with a half-dozen other theories. As I might myself were I to read it another four times. Does Murakami himself “know” what the city is? Given this is his third attempt at a story with the central conceit, I have my doubts.

Just as I doubt that it matters. Why would we try to pin any of this down to a single meaning? After all, this is a book that refuses to hew to a single linear timeline and whose narrative bifurcates again and again, so that we get two towns, two libraries, two ghosts, two asexual relationships, two disappearances, two woodstoves, two lost loves, the whole matter becoming ever more diffuse amongst a multiplicity of dreams, of character versions and echoes, of worlds, of reiterations and rephrasings of the same points. A book where the lines between reality and dream, reality and “non-reality” constantly blur:

• “The feeling of two things mixing together, as if part of a boundary had collapsed.”
• “Reality around me was cracking ever so slightly …”
• “A strange feeling of slippage, as if I’d suddenly wandered into a different world.”
• “A strange feeling, as if I’d strayed from present reality.”
All of which, to no surprise, leaves characters to constantly wonder where they stand or question their own reality:

• “Sometimes I can’t tell which is which.”
• “Which world should I belong to? I couldn’t decide.”
• “Soon we won’t be able to tell what’s hypothetical and what’s real.”
• “Was I the real me? ... it was getting hard to distinguish the hypothetical from the real.”
• “I no longer possessed a set standard with which to determine what was real.”
• I don’t have a sense that I’m living this life as myself, as the real me.
• I was trying to judge which side I was really on, and on which side the real person, the real me, could be found.

How one responds to all this is going to depend on one’s preference for utter clarity or resolution. Some I am sure, will find it maddeningly frustrating in how Murakami refuses to offer up clear answers. And I’d certainly be lying if I said I closed the book feeling wholly sure of various aspects, but then, given the author and the word “Uncertain” right there in the title, I didn’t expect to. Despite that, or more precisely, because of that, I still found it compelling in how it unsettles, provokes, and stimulates. Does the multiplicity of potential meanings have an adverse effect on the novel’s sense of cohesion or purpose? Probably. Is it muddy? Sure. But even with those downsides, I prefer the way Murakami refuses to put his metaphors into an authorial straitjacket so that we have no choice but to view them in one way and only that way. Or how he eschews the typical usage of these elements. How the shadows, for instance, are not a “dark” side of one’s consciousness. Or how the city, despite being the author’s goal and a place where he seems to find some peace for a while at least, is not painted as some sort of utopian refuge. The unicorns are not noble beasts, music and art are non-existent, food or conversation are lacking. Many a time during a descriptive passage of the city I’d write, “but is this good?” One could argue when it comes to his metaphors and images that Murakami refuses to commit. I contend he commits to not committing, and in doing so he commits to possibilities, to contradictions, to playfulness, to, yes, uncertainty. And for all the fantastical elements of this novel, is there anything more realistic in a depiction of our reality than uncertainty?

If the lack of clarity will meet with mixed reactions, other elements will find more consensus if not unanimous (when is it ever?) approval. The exploration of love lost and its global, rippling impact is moving and strong throughout, seen not just through the aimlessness of the main character following the disappearance of “you” but also through Mr. Koyasu, whose losses are great indeed. Hand in hand with loss goes isolation/loneliness, and that theme is if anything even more prevalent. Nearly every character of major import is lonely: the narrator, his young love, Mr. Koyasu, the woman in the coffee shop, Yellow Submarine Boy.

The narrator never fully recovered from the disappearance of you and the sudden, inexplicable love of his youth. Part of it was the loss itself, part of it the paralyzing impact of her sudden vanishing, a “constant fear … that even if I managed to unconditionally love someone, there would come a day … [they] would vanish, without explanation.” The immediate impact was withdrawal from the world, when he “had no interest in college … made no friends … read books alone.” Even later, when he comes out of his shell, starts to form friendships, and even finds a girlfriend, he says “inside I always held back a part of me, keeping a piece of my heart in reserve.” And thus “I wound up hurting my girlfriend, and that ended up hurting me. And I became all the more isolated and alone.”

Mr. Koyasu never fit in with his family, and then was isolated by twin tragedies, living “a quiet life shut away in his home.” Like the narrator, he eventually comes out of his reclusivity, “strolling around town, greeting and talking to people.” But even so, he takes care to changes his dress, opting for a skirt and beret, to forestall the town’s matchmakers, having no interest in another close relationship. The cafe owner, like the narrator and Mr. Koyasu has also suffered a lost love, though in a more typical fashion, now two years removed from a divorce caused by her husband’s infidelity. This led her to “go far away … somewhere where no one knew me.” Unknowingly echoing the narrator’s paralyzing fear of abandonment, she tells him, “I felt like no matter what man I might meet … no matter how much I felt I loved him, the same thing might happen all over again.” Meanwhile, Yellow Submarine boy is cut off by his autism. He does not go to school but spends every day in the library reading alone, his father is allegedly “embarrassed by him,” and his mother “adores him but probably doesn’t really get him.” According to Mrs. Soeda, the Chief Librarian, “neither one of [them] truly understands him or even makes an attempt to do so.”

I can’t say Murakami says anything particularly original or profound about loneliness and grief. In fact, some of the lines can feel awkwardly banal, as when one notes that, “Loneliness is extremely hard.” But in the slow accretion of loneliness, character by character (even a cat is described as “lonely” at one point), in the many introspective statements when characters describe their awareness of their loneliness, or in the simple descriptions of their mundane solo lives, the novel gains a surprising emotional power, one that makes the tenuous connections they do form — the narrator to Mr. Koyasu, to the coffee shop woman, to the Yellow Submarine Boy — even more affecting.

That said, the impact would have been even more enhanced with a more consistently strong characterization. While the narrator and Mr. Koyasu are well developed (Mr. Koyasu despite less page time and being a ghost actually feels the most alive of all the characters), other characters, particularly the female ones, fare less well. Yellow Submarine Boy comes across more either as a bare sketch of traits (a more generous reading) or as an overly simplified stereotype (the less generous read), while the women serve more as idea containers or plot props than as fully dimensional characters.
The two who are just mentioned in passing are Yellow Submarine Boy’s mother, who “hovers” over him, doesn’t understand him, and loves him “the way you love a pet cat”; and Mr. Koyasu’s wife, portrayed almost exclusively through her trauma. The women who make an active appearance aren’t much better. Mrs. Soeda is mostly, almost solely, a tool for exposition, explaining the backstory of both Mr. Koyasu and the Yellow Submarine Boy. We learn almost nothing about her as a person beyond that she is efficiently effective in her job, is married to a teacher, is childless, and naturally, being a librarian, wears glasses and keeps her hair in a bun. We also are told she has a slim figure, “lovely skin”, and has “healthy-looking calves,” the image of which “lingers” when she has left the room, details that hardly strengthen Murakami’s bona fides when it comes to crafting female characters.
When it comes to the two women who get some real dialogue beyond exposition, the narrator’s love at least has a bit of depth with an evocative description of her depression and alienation, but that’s the only aspect we truly see of her beyond her invention (if one can use that word) of the city. The cafe woman is also portrayed mostly through her sense of being a bit broken, partially by her past relationship and the ensuing fear of entering another relationship, and also by her inability to have sex, which predated her marriage and for which she apologizes to the narrator. We also get what I’d call an unfortunate and painfully overt metaphor via her decision to, whenever she is not alone, wear a “special underwear … that wasn’t metal, but a little too hard to be called clothes. Resilient, but plenty strong enough to repel anyone,” and that makes her feel “at ease. Like I’m completely protected. Safeguarded.” All in all, the book would have been a richer experience had the women been presented with more depth and variety.
Other clunky bits, akin to the “special underwear” mar the experience periodically. A discussion of Gabriel Garcia Marquez feels shoehorned in and awkwardly on point:
“In his stories, the real and the unreal, the living and the dead are all mixed together … Like that’s an ordinary, everyday thing.”
“People often call that magical realism.”
Similarly, the usual Murakami “notes” can pop in discordantly, as when the jazz references enter out of the blue. Or the whiskey. Every writer has their little tropes and tics, of course, but here, while some come in organically, such as the cat references, others feel like we’re getting items checked off a list. It’s not that the writer put them in, but that it sometimes feels the work wasn’t done to make them belong; there’s no sense they derive from a natural outgrowth of character or plot. Other jarring moments include a pair of references to Anne Frank that seems to trivialize that story and a reference to Scarlet O’Hara. And finally, while as noted the repetitions and reiterations do serve a thematic purpose, I’m not sure we needed all of them. The same I’d say goes for the mundane details of preparing the night’s dinner for instance. Cutting the book by 10-15 percent probably would have been to its advantage.

I started out this review by saying I was of two minds on The City and Its Uncertain Walls. Let’s call them “Real Me” and “Shadow Me.” One of them (does it matter which?) had issues with the thin portrayal of the female characters, the sometimes awkward and clunky bits of exposition or introduction of Murakami’s pet references, the occasional too-on-the-nose metaphors, and the sometimes prosaic or naïve pronouncements that seemed to be aiming for a profundity they didn’t achieve. The other ate up the non-linear structure, the use of echoes, the playful and stimulating multiplicity of possible meanings, the thematic focus on grief, love, loss, and loneliness, the way I was moved by how characters who had found themselves in an aimless, lifeless rut, waiting as if in suspended animation, finally found themselves able to take some hesitant steps forward. And I’ll almost always take being made to feel and think over craft annoyances. The City and Its Uncertain Walls is not a perfect work, it’s not Murakami’s best work, but I’m of one mind on its value, and it is a work certainly worthy of reading (even rereading as I found my second time around).

The city and its uncertain walls by Haruki Murakami was interesting.
I have enjoyed some of his other books, but this one was a bit more challenging for me. Parts of it I liked, while other parts seemed to drag. overall it was unique and interesting and I’m glad I read it. thanks to the publisher for the e-arc.

The City and Its Uncertain WAlls was a super interesting read. I loved the character study and the writing felt propulsive. I'd read more from the author.

I’m maybe not smart enough for this? I had a hard time following the timelines and very magical elements.

Without giving it all away, there’s three parts, a teenage boy and teenage girl are in love and she talks of this magical city she used to live in and in the next part as an older man he goes there. He also becomes a librarian in another part.

I think it’s about dreaming and the secret parts of ourselves but what do I know.

Thank you the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC of The City and Its Uncertain Walls!

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.

This was such a beautiful book! The writing is astounding and so lyrical. I loved the magical elements of the story and I wanted to move to the mountain town. As many other reviews have stated, there is not much of a plot but also not much character development. It is beautiful writing for the sake of writing and the story comes second. Not that the story isn't good; it is an enchanting story.

I have been a huge Murakami fan for years but this book just didn't do it for me. I felt like there were a lot of interesting ideas but nothing was fully fleshed out. The premise of the library was really intriguing but I was left wanting more and for it to feel like it was actually going somewhere. I felt the story kind of meanders along unfortunately. I did enjoy Boku and Kimi. Murakami always writes incredible characters that are so unique and interesting. The book did not feel as much as an ode to books as the blurb would have us believe but more of an ode to his style of writing and the imagination that is found within books. Although I did not enjoy this book I will always, always grab a Murakami book! One of the greatest writers of our generation in my opinion

This book is like a dream. So much going on, and it's rich with Murakami's beautiful writing style. It's like a fever dream between life and death, fading in and out, finding yourself and reflecting on moments lived. An essential read for Murakami fans and a must-have book for all collections.

I wish I had read some of Murakami’s other work before this one, but I still enjoyed it. I loved the fantastical other world and loved our main character. Looking forward to diving into his backlist now!

This is one of the best books that I've read in a long time. I wasn't sure how I felt about it at first, but I became quickly immersed in this story. It's one of those books that I just keep thinking about. That doesn't happen to me a lot but it certainly has with this book!

The City and Its Uncertain Walls returns us to one of his most enigmatic worlds, blending surrealism, existential longing, and the quiet melancholy of lost love. The novel follows a nameless protagonist whose search for a vanished girl leads him to a walled city beyond the boundaries of reality—a place where dreams are read, shadows slip away, and the past lingers like an unfinished melody. Murakami’s signature motifs—jazz, libraries, and the porous divide between worlds—are woven into a narrative that feels both familiar and hauntingly new. When I was done, I had to go back and reread (or maybe just read for the first time?) Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World to make sense of it all. The walled city at its core is haunting, and stays with you after you finish the novel, like a fading dream. A good read if you love his quiet, moody, atmospheric storytelling.

Murakami’s books are always thought-provoking and often serve as a palate cleanser for me because they are so different from most books. The City and Its Uncertain Walls is no different in that regard. This is a slow burn, large book, so you have to be in the right mood for this one. If you’re feeling sentimental and emotional but curious and interested in relationships, this is for you.
This is a story involving two worlds. One is seemingly reality, the other a simpler existence behind a large wall. In this other world people must give up their shadows to exist there, unicorns roam free only to die from the harsh elements. Dreams are read by a Dream Reader.
This is an odd story. There is a quest to find truth, and also a love story split between two worlds. Lovers of libraries will find comfort in these pages because this town, enclosed by a wall, centers around a library, a very special one.
This one did take me awhile to get into it. Initially, the alternating chapters were challenging because I wasn’t able to discern who was speaking. The two main characters are nameless and since the story bounces between two worlds, I felt that it was a little hard to get to know them. But about half way through I found the pace.
Definitely unique and interesting.

Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Over the years, I have started Murakami books in fits and spurts, only able to get a handful of pages or chapters in before I had to set it down. I think part of that is just because I was quite young when I tried, and I haven’t given him another attempt since I came back to reading in 2020. Regardless, I’m glad that I read this even if it is a peculiar (proper) introduction to his fiction). I enjoyed his exploration into the complexity of human nature and the meaning of life and while sometimes the novel meandered and he was, predictably, quite strange towards women at times, I liked this and will be trying those abandoned paperbacks I tried in high school again.

Haruki Murakami is a master of magical realism. This gentle exploration of time, timeliness, timelessness is a class in itself as it's a continuance and deepening of a novella he published decades ago, and explored in a later novel.

It's a love story but not a romance.
It touches on one's inner spark/soul yet is not religious.
It's a story of two libraries, one filled with a fictional town's old dreams and one an eccentric's personal collection of books donated to his small, mountain town.

Thank you so much to netgalley and the publisher for the arc of this one in exchange for an honest review!

I have been wanting to try this author because he is so popular. Unfortunately, I don’t think he is for me.

I was honestly bored throughout. This book was so long and it could’ve been way shorter.

I will probably try others by this author still to see what the hype is about.

I haven't read a lot of Murakami, and while I liked some of the magical elements in this one, it was mostly a sketched concept than an actual book with purposeful plot for me. I think I most enjoyed the aspects of a shadow city where one must forfeit their own to be in the town, as well as the idea of a Reader of Dreams. But then this man becomes infatuated with a woman who isn't entirely interested in him, but who is troubled, and decides to make her his entire life and personality (literally what). Also, as an actual credentialed librarian, I immediately bristled at the way this man just asks another man to find him a library job - even clarifies that he does not have any education or experience in any library - and this other man tells him, "Sure, there's a Director of a Library job that just opened, I will send them an inquiry" and he GETS IT. LOL, whatever. I know that's not the actual point, but it's pretty unrealistic (and insulting, imho).

Overall, again, this felt more like interested concepts taped together than a cohesive tale.

Strange and imaginative - just as expected. There were times I really was not sure what was happening, but continued to be delighted by the magical prose until it finally clicked.