The City and Its Uncertain Walls is Haruki Murakami’s fifteenth novel since his first, Hear the Wind Sing, published in 1979. His most recent is unmistakeably his, unmistakeably an addition to his body of work and his own special brand of magic realism as practiced by the South American writers Jorges Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as Japan’s Kobo Abe and Yoko Ogawa, and writers like Mo Yan, Salman Rushie, and Toni Morrison. Murakami’s approach is metafictional magic realism to the extent to which he explicitly questions the nature of realism and truth throughout the novel. Murakami’s readers will not be surprised. As he says in his afterword:
As Jorge Luis Borges put it, there are basically a limited number of stories one writer can seriously relate in his lifetime. All we do—I think it’s fair to say— is take that limited pallet of motifs, change the approach and methods as we go, and rewrite them in all sorts of ways.
Murakami also continues his appreciation of popular culture, in particular. The Beatles and modern jazz, even as he sets his novel outside of contemporary culture, popular or other, much as Márquez does with his One Hundred Years of Solitude.
With The City and Its Uncertain Walls, the “journey” the main character takes is one of self-discovery. That discovery is the climax of the novel, but the self is the product of a shifting array of possible worlds. Both Murakami and his main character share Murakami’s sentiment advanced in the afterword: “Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change and movement.” The main character would add “identity and reality” to that statement.
“Uncertain” walls is an apt description given the constant challenge, given the ongoing questioning of reality. In that sense, reality is bound by whatever walls people throw up and agree to live with. There is also the fact that, given such uncertainty, walls leak.
The main character breaks his story into three parts. The first part is Murakami’s rewritten 1985 novella, Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Here, the main character is seventeen and suffering mutual infatuation with a sixteen-year-old girl. She opens with a description of a fantastic city in the midst of which is a small library, one in need of a Dream Reader. She also informs him that neither of them is real in the here and now where they hug and kiss and hold hands and he transcribes her stories. The “real” main character will become that Dream Reader, charged with reading the dreams of citizens in the city. The “real” love interest will be there to help him. Tragically, once they are in the fantastic city, neither will remember the other. With that, Murakami announces another wrinkle to the problem of identity: “memory”.
The girl disappears. The young man eventually travels to the city. When he enters the main gate, his shadow is severed from him and set aside to die. He assumes, not without discontent, the responsibilities of the Dream Reader, one being he maintains an attachment, so to speak, to his shadow. He checks on the shadow as it slowly wastes away. Conversations between them follow, which lead to their joining resources and escaping the city.
The second part of the novel is the most compelling. The main character has just quit a job he has held for some years. He answers an ad for the position of head librarian in a library in an isolated town tucked in the mountains and generally outside interaction with the rest of Japan and with the world. He is interviewed and hired immediately by the former director, who has recently passed away. Apparently the main character’s hiring was predetermined, thereby adding both existence after “death” and “destiny” to the flavors available to his continuing questioning of reality.
He begins dating a woman. Informed by their reading of García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, they begin fashioning a fantasy world of their own. It would be well worth readers’ time to read the García Márquez novel alongside The City and Its Uncertain Walls. not only for the conversation Murakami is having with García Márquez, but for the nature of romantic relationships in an uncertain world.
She opens to a passage from García Márquez when they meet to pick her up for a dinner date. She reads in part:
The only creature they saw from the boat was a woman dressed in white, signaling to them with a handkerchief. Fermina Daza could not understand why she was not picked up when she seemed so distressed, but the Captain explained that she was the ghost of a drowned woman whose deceptive signals were intended to lure ships off course into the dangerous whirlpools along the other bank. They passed so close that Fermina Daza saw her in sharp detail in the sunlight, and she had no doubt that she did not exist, but her face seemed familiar.
In their subsequent conversations the real and unreal co-exist, the Colombian author opens the door to another variation of themes played with by Murakami plays with—that of the real and unreal co-existing in social relationships, including love as developed in his relationship with this woman and with the young girl of part one.
In addition to the dead librarian and the woman, a young boy, dubbed The Yellow Submarine Boy from The Beatles’ image gracing his parka, offers another variation. He reads in the library during all the hours the library is open. He quickly moves from one book to the next without any obvious system informing his selections. The main character is somewhat amazed by the young man.
I couldn’t imagine how his brain processes operated. Maybe he took the massive amount of knowledge he’d amassed over the week, used that free time to organize it systematically and reorder it. He’d take the fragments he gathered from The Home Medical Encyclopedia and Wittgenstein on Language, connect them organically, intertwine them to transform them into one part of a massive Pillar of Wisdom. […] Yellow Submarine Boy … He himself was capable of becoming a freestanding, autonomous library. This thought struck me, and I exhaled deeply.
Another passage from García Márquez prompts the appearance of the sixteen-year-old girl from the first part. She hasn’t aged. His own body reverts to his seventeen-year-old body, but his memories remain. Here marks the transition to the final part of the novel, one where Murakami pulls together the varied threads in what at times feels at times like a Platonic dialogue, encounters with his past and present, conversations with the Yellow Submarine Boy in his unconscious. His main character finally comes to decide who he is and will be. Perhaps.
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